A Writer of Fictions

#3: The Decemberists - Picaresque. Another group to which I'd not been exposed until last year, although at least I'd heard of them. Their previous album, Her Majesty, had caused quite a few ripples among the indie congnosenti, but I had no idea what to expect when I first put this on. Which was a good thing.

What I got was, as I've taken to calling it, musical theater--without the theater. Colin Meloy, who handles both songwriting and lead vocal duties, doesn't write songs so much as long narrative threads that sound more like short stories that have been set to music. Take this little snapshot of cleverness from album opener "The Infanta:"

Among five score pachyderm
All canopied and passenger'd
Sit the Duke and Duchess's luscious young girls
Within sight of the Baroness
Seething spite for this lithe largess
By her side sits the Baron--her barren-ness barbs her

The music tends to be folky yet dramatic, which just serves to reinforce the theatrical connection (to my mind, at least). To accomodate the stories, some of the tunes are stretched out to prog-rock length, but the time is meant to serve the virtuosity (and--let's be honest here--occasional verbosity) of the lyrics instead of showcasing the playing.

I'm not just pulling this out of my arse, either. Heck, the review over at AllMusic name-checks Kurt Weill. So don't take my word for it.

The other advantages of this approach is that, unlike actual musical theater, you won't have to pay ~$100 to hear it. Or, for that matter, be bothered with all that pesky dialogue they use to fill in the spaces between songs.