Professor Yeti

Here in Portland, Oregon, the indie rock capital of the west, you can hear the Decemberists on the radio. The privilege of this still takes me by surprise. Antiquely, and despite vast evidence to the contrary, I still think of indie rock like it’s a secret that only I and a few of my friends are privy to. Hearing it in a public place jars me. I lose my context for a moment, and in these moments odd thoughts can arise. Example: A few weeks ago, I heard the rather puckish political satire of “Sixteen Military Wives” frolicking over the airwaves while I was driving around the city looking for a quality badminton set. (If that scenario isn’t an endorsement for carefree Oregon life, I don’t know what is.) Hearing Colin Meloy’s voice out of the context of my computer’s mp3 collection made me able to hear it anew, and come up with the following revelation: He sounds like the guy from Harvey Danger, but in a way that makes the guy from Harvey Danger sound really good. Likewise, “Sixteen Military Wives” somehow conjures up for me the ’90s flash-in-the-pan classic “Flagpole Sitta.” The comparison turns into a cage-match, and a huge, bizarre upset is scored: listening to the two songs back-to-back, it is my belief that “Flagpole Sitta” outclasses the Decemberists. It sounds leaner and more dangerous, and that’s no great surprise, but it also sounds fresher and…somehow…more relevant. Huh?

Producing opinions like this makes one need to stop and reflect. Am I biased towards one-hit-wonder songs I heard on alternative radio in the late ’90s? Yes, very much. I already knew that. But am I biased against the Decemberists? …Yes! I surprise myself, and find that I am. I always thought I liked the Decemberists, but, you know, now that I really stop and pose the question to myself, they kind of annoy me. It goes beyond Colin Meloy’s nasal faux-British singing voice, although any number of negative adjectives can easily be pinned on that instrument. Looking a little deeper, here’s my beef: musically, The Decemberists are commonplace and a little hokey. All the surrounding musicians are, at best, solid support for what Colin Meloy brings — excellent melodies, an emphasis on storytelling that’s unheard of within the genre, and truly literary lyrics. But, with the exception of a couple fine turns of phrase (one about a stillborn baby, the other about the Multnomah County Library), I’m not convinced that his adventure-book scenarios and antique adjectives are “truly literary” at all. That Meloy so expertly and consistently role-plays as an eighteenth-century musical dramatist is surely an enjoyable curiosity; I’m not sure if it’s literature. It may even be detracting from his ability to say anything meaningful. Do my criticisms have merit? Or am I just being a snobbish hypocrite, dishing a little jealous player-hate onto Portland’s most recognizable young literary figure? Bring on their new album: Of or relating to a genre of usually satiric prose fiction originating in Spain and depicting in realistic, often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social degree living by his or her wits in a corrupt society. Bring on Picaresque…

…It turns out that Picaresque is proof against criticism, at least initially: it’s charming and well-played, and very hard not to like. Beyond that, I think I can determine whether or not you’ll love it with one question: Do you love musicals? If you do, and if you want the same things out of a pop album that you want out of a musical stage show, then good god, you’ll fall fast and hard for Picaresque. If, god forbid, you are one of those sorts who likes to purchase the soundtracks to Broadway musicals and play them in the car, or when you have people over, the way normal people play real music, then you can shut your cheese-ball eyes on this review right now and make a confident purchase. The Decemberists are indie-rock for theater majors. Remember on the Clay & Reuben season of American Idol, when the judges kept pointing out the “destined for Broadway” quality of everything Clay Aiken sung and did? Same thing with Colin Meloy. If he were born 40 years ago, he’d have been Stephen Sondheim. 200 years ago, he’d have been Richard Brinsley Sheridan. “I Was Meant for the Stage,” indeed.

The Decemberists aren’t musicians posing as amateur theatricals; they’re professional theatricals transplanted into the Portland indie-rock world. Their songs have titles like “Eli, The Barrow Boy” and “The Mariner’s Revenge Song,” which are every bit as full of dramatis personae and melodramatic turns of event as you’d think. And they are very, very good at what they do. The “orchestra pit” (the band minus Meloy) still seems a bit faceless to me, but they’ve made great strides musically since their first album. Their support has become powerful and rich and warm. As for Meloy, he too seems to be flexing his ability to consistently and confidently nail whatever it is he aims at — providing it has a few dusty adjectives (”palanquin,” “purloined,” “chaparral”) and a seafarer in it somewhere. Picaresque holds the sound of a band in full bloom. The Decemberists record more cleanly, play more crisply, and write more creatively than just about any band you know.

…Which brings me back around to why I think Harvey Danger is better. I find it hard to love The Decemberists, or to have more than a passing affection for Picaresque, because there’s something about the majority of their work that makes me want to cry: “Irrelevant!” First I’d better come clean about a pertinent fact: I hate musicals. People have tried to break me of this ornery mindset, but even the most substantial musicals they’ve gotten me to see seemed, at best, like well-made trifles, giving but the illusion of depth. Most of the songs on Picaresque exist at right about the level of a substantial musical. They’re poignant, timeless, and, to a certain mindset, pretty much pointless. Why? They exist in a void. They reflect little of actual life, and little of emotional life either, not as I know it. They do not resonate.

I suppose what I’m criticizing here is Colin Meloy’s inability to write about me. Most people, when they make this criticism, say it a different way: they say that he doesn’t write about himself. But these are two sides of one coin, and the only way to write about other people is to write about yourself, as Meloy well knows. I read an interview last week in the Seattle Weekly in which he gave the following quote: “I think one of the most impressive mantras I ever took from my time in a creative writing workshop is that when you’re reading a story about someone’s mother, you don’t really care about their mother or their relationship to their mother, you care about your relationship to your mother.” And Picaresque ultimately leaves me shrugging, because it doesn’t tell me a damn thing about my mother. Meloy’s songs are too impersonal to have much emotional resonance. This is why I always found the early comparison of The Decemberists to the Neutral Milk Hotel to be off-target. NMH’s bizarre, antique world seems constructed to be a vessel through which intense, raw emotion can be channeled without seeming familiarly maudlin or excessive. The Decemberists’ antique worlds seem quaint and harmless by comparison; they’re constructed solely for their own sake, as in musicals. At best they speak to basic, fairly traditional emotions: melancholy, jealousy, revenge. Rarely does Colin Meloy reveal himself within his songs, and even when he does, there is little sense of risk, and little feeling of reward. Take the one song on Picaresque that does not role-play: the brief, awkward closer “Of Angels and Angels.” I was excited to hear a straight-forward song in this prestigious position — I suppose I expected a revelation. I didn’t get it. The song briefly details a happy domestic nocturne, unwinds a little nice flattery, starts to repeat itself, then…abruptly ends. I can’t help but hear this as a kind of failure. There’s no better band than The Decemberists for entertaining you with tales of four-score and various numbers of years ago, but they may have gotten so used to doing so, they can’t tell you anything about the present. Meloy can spin a colorful tale, but take away his broad strokes and his storytelling seems suddenly thin. The moment comes for him to speak for himself, but he’s got nothing to say.

Chris Leslie-Hynan was a doubles champion in his Beginning Badminton class.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 3rd, 2005 at 10:43 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.