Some good music: The Crane Wife by the Decemberists

I've really been enjoying listening to The Crane Wife by the Decemberists. It's their newest album, and it's a lot more musically complex than their earlier stuff.

The Decemberists are a band with a knack for poetry and a staggeringly large vocabulary. I'm not sure why anybody would want to rhyme "Sycorax" with "parallax", but they did it. And somehow they managed to make it sound good.

Their songs tend to sound like something particularly gritty yet flowery from the 1800s or thenabouts, with all their talk of chimney sweeps and sailing ships and the landed gentry. And for some reason they seem totally incapable of making a purely happy song. If they sing anything perky and optimistic then they have to set it in an air-raid shelter during the London Blitz or something. They still manage to create some beautiful songs, as well as some that are just plain cool.

For an example of the latter, consider The Mariner's Revenge Song, a rather long mini-epic about an orphaned boy who becomes a sailor and gets revenge for something with the aid of a giant whale and a priory. It's got some of the best accordion playing I've ever heard, and manages to get the spooky sea shanty sound just right. If there is anything more creepy-cool than the premise of this song, I have yet to hear it in musical form.

For an example of the Decemberists making something lovely, Yankee Bayonet will do nicely. It contains such phrases as "Look for me when the sun-bright swallow sings upon the birch bough high", sung in pleasant voices with pleasant instrumental accompaniment. Never mind that it's technically supposed to be a sad song; it's still a pretty image.

A list of all the songs, and what I think of them

Yes, I'm going to list every song on this album and talk about each of them in turn.

The Crane Wife (1, 2, and 3): This is a three-part series of songs. It tells one version of the old Japanese tragedy called "The Crane Wife". I think it was just an excuse for the Decemberists to try their hand at rocking out. They manage to make regretful lyrics sound bouncy. I'm not sure how. Or why.

The Island: Come and see / The Landlord's Daughter / You'll not feel the drowning: this song has a ridiculously long name because it has three different parts in one twelve-minute song. The music here is some of their best, both haunting and toe-tapping. I still don't know what the lyrics mean, but it's probably my favorite song on the album.

Yankee Bayonet: Imagine a beautiful, poetic love song in which one of the two main characters died in the Civil War. This is it.

The Perfect Crime No. 2: I don't know what the number one perfect crime was, but I don't really care that much. This is the weakest song on the album. They try to get funky (really!), but it doesn't work out quite as well as they'd hoped.

When the War Came: This is probably the only song ever written about Soviet botanists during World War 2 trying to protect experiemental high-yield crops during a famine. This actually happened. The song uses the word "caterwaul" to great effect.

Shankill Butchers: one of the spookiest songs since "Mister Tinkertrain". This is a slow, quiet warning to children about a militant group in Northern Ireland that used to go out and murder Catholics at random. It sounds like something that Roald Dahl would have written.

Summersong: This song sounds pretty cheerful. I haven't really listened to the lyrics because they're hard to make out and I just know they'll probably involve shipwrecks or something.

Sons & Daughters: You remember how I mentioned that the Decemberists couldn't make a song that's really happy and cheerful and optimistic without setting it during the London Blitz or something? This is the song I was talking about. It's bouncy. It's happy. It's set in a bomb shelter during the London Blitz.


All in all, a good album. Very unusual and different, and good to listen to.