The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love (2009)

I think I’d be obsessive-compulsive if I wasn’t too lazy.

I’m probably not chronically lazy. ‘Chronically’ implies an investment of time and energy that I’m frankly not interested in making at this juncture. No, I certainly don’t put effort into it. Sometimes it sort of feels like laziness isn’t even a conscious decision on my part; it’s like I was born with abnormally deep wellsprings of lethargy, which, combined with the cynicism native to my generation, manifests itself as a kind of apathetic listlessness.

It wasn’t always this way. I was a pretty bright kid, the type who could mentally compose a delicate haiku while solving complex equations and then walk into a glass door or get tangled in a bean bag and fall down some stairs (child prodigies don’t have time for anything mundane like physical dimensions). My parents did their best to instil me with a decent work ethic and nurture the budding flower of my intellect. There were books in abundance – oh, such books! – and gifted and talented classes – oh, such classes! – and times tables set to music in the car – oh, such music! I imagine that’s what they play in heaven’s elevator. Though my nine times tables are a distant memory, I will never forget the sweet strains of the angelic melody to which they were set: nine times one is / nine (ninetimesoneisnine!) Once in a while I’d be regaled with tales of squandered potential or motivational proverbs. ‘Don’t hide your light under a bushel!’ they’d say. ‘Idle hands are the Devil’s playthings!’ But it was all for naught: the ravenous aphids of puberty set in and gnawed away at the dainty blossom that was my innocent brain.

I suspect Dad, ever the realist, adopted a laissez-faire approach to my gentle careen into redundancy a while back, but Mum, bless ‘er ‘eart, still clings to a faint thread of hope. Every now and again she’ll brave the fumes of my room and cast a wrinkly-nosed glance at the dusty jumbles of crap on my shelves and the festering knots of clothes on the floor. I’ll feel her glare graze the side of my head and take a deep breath. We both know what’s coming and we both understand the futility of it, but we know we can’t avoid it: we are propelled by the cyclical weight of history, forced into the roles that our lives have defined for us. Together we dance to a tune that only we two can hear, and it’s the sweetest, saddest tune you can imagine.

Mum says, ‘This room’s a bit of a mess,’ or some variation. When she’s in a more sprightly, frivolous mood she’ll suggest that I clean out my clothing drawers or order my bookshelf. I dismiss these subtle hints with unsubtle scorn, but also sympathy. Mum and I both know that there’s no point to me cleaning out my drawers – I’ll just compile more crap from somewhere and fill ‘em up again. For Mum, though, it’s all about the principle, whatever that may be. Clean drawers open new doors! or some such quaint saying. She has noble aspirations, and I pity her even while I delight in crushing her optimistic spirit. It’s like she’s fighting an uphill battle, and the battle is taking place on a downwards-moving escalator, and the escalator has banana peels on it. And over the hill there’s a cliff.

And yet, against all odds, it’s a battle she sometimes wins. Which is how yesterday I found myself sifting through two decades’ worth of shit that’s accumulated in my room, miserably destroying priceless receptacles of countless childhood memories under Mum’s ruthless cleaning regime. It’s also how I came to embrace my obsessive-compulsive streak: while arbitrarily dividing my t-shirts into ‘chuck’ and ‘keep’ piles, I came to realise that I like them folded a certain way (lie one on its front, fold in one arm then the other, then kind of concertina it up thricewise from the bottom into a little square – that way, you can see the pattern on the t-shirt when it’s in the drawer!) and that I also like them ordered according to the probable frequency of which I will wear them.

Because that took me so long, I found myself in this weird situation where I wanted to clean some shit up but I was just too burnt out (fifteen minutes of sorting out t-shirts will do that to you). As a compromise, I decided to tidy up my iPod. That seemed like a great idea until I realised that I really just wanted to listen to my iPod. So I did that instead. And that’s how I rediscovered The Decemberists.

I was once involved in a serious relationship with The Hazards of Love, The Decemberists’ fifth and most recent album. Oh, we had our ups and downs – what couple doesn’t? – but we were young, and redonkulously in love, and for three or four sparkling, wondrous months the world was ours. But then I messed it all up. I became possessive and weird. Every day I’d come home bitter and grumpy, raging at the cruelty of a life that would foist 6 hours of uni a week upon me. I’d demand constant attention, seethe and snark when I didn’t get it. When my advances were gently rebuffed I would mercilessly force it to play for me, over and over again, while I sat there listening in the dingy darkness, weeping at what I had become. Then one day I came home and Hazards was gone – no message, no note, no nothin’. The worst thing of all was that I just didn’t care. How could such profound attachment have dwindled so swiftly to apathy? It was a question worthy of Dr Phil.

So yeah, I was pretty chuffed yesterday when The Decemberists snuck back into my playlist and thence into my heart. Allow me to explain. Hazards is more than just an album; it’s also a story, simply told, but with incredible emotion and energy. According to Wikipedia it’s a rock opera, but to me that just conjures an image of a robust-yet-skeletal, shaggy-haired androgynoid wielding an electric guitar, wearing a Viking helmet and eating bat heads while singing in an incomprehensible tongue (either Italian or just generic rock-screeching). Hazards belongs in its own genre, a genre which I will coin for The Decemberists now: rock n soul folk-popera. Okay, that’s wildly inaccurate, but doesn’t that sound great?

The premise of Hazards is sort of geeky – kind of like an aural game of Dungeons and Dragons (I imagine!) – which is maybe why it isn’t that popular. Or it could be not that reason at all. I’m not your reason-maker! But I can pretty much guarantee that any creature capable of compassion and feeling will be entirely defenceless against the musical, emotional onslaught that The Decemberists hath wrought (that was a little sample of the lyrical style of Hazards, which includes brilliant lines like, ‘Fourteen lithesome maidens lay alone in their bower’ and, ‘What irascible blackguard is the father?’) Colin Meloy, the band’s frontman and songwriter, has a decent voice, but his true talent lies in threading his incredible lyrics together with the haunting, atmospheric score.

The story is light enough: Margaret, a young woman, meets and falls for William, a shapeshifter, but their love is thwarted by the queen of the forest (William’s possessive, scheming stepmother) and a lascivious rake who preys on women. The narrative’s simplicity isn’t clumsy or obtrusive – it seems intentional, as though the band decided that anything more complex might detract from the music. The undemanding plot also means that Meloy gets to weave some of the most beautiful, lyrical language I think I’ve ever encountered. I was trying to find some good illustrative excerpts, but it’s hard to isolate the words from the story, music and the power of the singers…so I won’t.

Instead, I’ll say this: the range and breadth of emotion captured in this album is just…ace. It’s ace of base. The parts of Margaret and the fairy queen are played by Becky Stark and Shara Worden, who are apparently staples of the US indie folk-rock scene…so nobody knows about them. But that’ll all change with this blog (although I may be grievously overestimating my influence). Stark is gentle and understated as Margaret, and is exactly what the role needs, and Worden is an off-the-charts psycho powerhouse as the vindictive queen, and is exactly what my soul needs. Worden’s ill-concealed rage bubbles just beneath the surface of every furious word she sings, her deep, tremulous voice turning slower songs like The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid into violent, frothing sound-cauldrons of boiling hot wrath. Stark’s passive Margaret doesn’t get much of an opportunity to match Worden’s primal emotion, but the rake (Meloy) comes close, the menace beneath his sweet, almost Brian Molko-esque drone exposed by his frigid (and chillingly cool) nonchalance towards killing his own children. If you’ve heard anything from Hazards it’ll probably be The Rake’s Song, and while it’s a great track, it gives a weird impression of the band out of context. First hearing it on the radio, I assumed that The Decemberists were some kind of goth-punk-rock band, which is a style they might occasionally borrow from (along with many others), but definitely not one which defines them.

Just to reinforce, I really like Hazards. There was a period of my life, when I was living away from home, in which I think this album sort of defined me. That makes it sound like I had some grim, directionless existence, which isn’t true at all; but there was something about the fragile, lingering sadness of it, the way the beauty of the music clung to my thoughts and my feelings and everything I did for days after listening to it, that gently marked me in some enduring, subtle way. And, despite these past raw months of separation, those indelible marks are still there, somewhere between ear and heart, unfaded.

I’m not going to link a track from Hazards, because I really feel that it needs to be listened to as one complete work (at least the first few times), but here’s a song from The Crane Wife, which is also awesome:

P.S. I’m going to be away for 10 days while I tumble down some New Zealand slopes and then get my festy on at SPLENDOUR IN THE GRASS! Expect ecstatic, exuberant postage when I get back.