Long Live the King
Anything Decemberists singer Colin Meloy touches turns tragic. It’s in his delivery. Notes drop lower, and an ominous mood trickles in. These six tunes (cut during the sessions at Oregon\'s Pendarvis Farm for their acclaimed *The King Is Dead* release) further the group’s newfound roots influences. “E. Watson” plays like an ageless folk ballad, with backing vocals from Laura Veirs and Annalisa Tornfelt. “Foregone” throws on the country-rock influences, with pedal steel guitar lighting the way. “Burying Davy” builds to near progressive rock heights with guitars that replicate the \'70s FM-radio experience. Even the earnest quick shuffle of the home demo for “I4U & U4ME” has a sense of hangover pervading its sense of joy, while their cover of The Grateful Dead’s “Row Jimmy” lurches with the decadent sway of early-\'70s countrified Rolling Stones and “Sonnet” kicks in with a horn section. The group\'s firing on all cylinders here. For a collection of b-sides, this is pretty much essential listening.
The follow-up EP to this year's The King Is Dead is not a cohesive artistic effort so much as a jumble of remainders that, taken on an individual basis, still have a story to tell.
On this year’s winning The King Is Dead, The Decemberists presented the most immediately engaging batch of songs of their career, playing rootsy and melodic folk-pop with more grit than the bookish ensemble is known for. Where The King Is Dead represented the band loosening their neckties a bit, the album’s EP-sized…
With The Decemberists, it's s safe bet that somewhere between the post-Brit-folk of Fairport Convention and Morrissey's darkness, leader Colin Meloy will emerge with a collection of impossibly literate tales that embrace death, consider love's perils and offer up a swirling pastiche of indie rock. Emotionally complex and lyrical seems the rule in a musicality that's straightforward as it can be.
Long Live the King, a six-track EP recorded around the same time as the R.E.M.-inspired King Is Dead, opens with “E. Watson,” a spare, moody tale of a sugar cane plantation owner named Edgar Watson, which couldn’t be further from the sunny rural folk jamboree glow that permeated the band's 2011 full-length.
The Decemberists' last album, The King is Dead, was a deliberately ramshackle affair.
The Decemberists' Long Live the King EP comes along roughly 10 months after its last album, The King Is Dead.
The Decemberists - Long Live the King review: A continued expedition into the folk depths and country sway of new age Americana…