The Crane Wife
The Decemberists’ ornate, highly literary folk-pop reached peak clarity on *The Crane Wife*, their first for a major label. Anchored by a song cycle based on an old Japanese folktale, the album (whose other subjects include the Siege of Leningrad and a Protestant paramilitary group in Northern Ireland) is a wildly ambitious undertaking, more indebted to Jethro Tull than indie rock, peppered by bouzouki and hurdy-gurdy and other obscure, alluring sounds that helped foster the band’s deserved cult audience.
Colin Meloy's theatrical and hyperliterate band makes an unexpected move to Capitol Records, and delivers a record that matches the ambition of its new imprint.
As great as The Decemberists' 2005 Picaresque is, the band's real creative breakthrough came a year earlier, on the 18-minute single "The Tain," which integrated Colin Meloy's hyper-literate whimsy into an ambitious yet tuneful song-suite. On the second track of The Decemberists' new album, The Crane Wife, Meloy…
Finally! A UK release for The Decemberists major label debut The Crane Wife. This side of the Atlantic we seem to have missed this one, topping many a Year End list for 2006 in the US, we’ve had to wait till now to get it (officially at least). But it…
While it is difficult to imagine the suits at Capitol seeing dollar signs in the eyes of an accordion- and bouzouki-wielding, British folk-inspired collective from Portland, OR, that dresses in period Civil War outfits and has been known to cover Morrissey, it's hard to argue with what the Decemberists have wrought from their bounty.
It’s too inconsistent to be declared the masterpiece of which Colin Meloy and company are capable.
The Decemberists, as those who have heard their music know, make often beautiful, literate, and at times even epic period pieces of musical historical...