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Raise Aloft the Studdingsails, Buggery! It's The Decemberists
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February 7, 2007 - Jeb Tennyson "Sea Chanty" Lund (Columnist)
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... the wank... the wank... the wank... |
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Duckface: I thought U2 were a type of submarine.
Charles: Well, in a way, you were right. Their music has a very naval quality.
— New Musical Express: The Musical, 1999
After being pestered for years by the music press and those two assholes who do most of the Onion's AV album reviews, I finally checked out a collection of songs by The Decemberists. Minutes into the first song and after hitting "random" and then skipping to the first 30 seconds of a half dozen others, I naturally inferred that the group was formed as a joke by a gaggle of Saab-driving proto-hippy music-ironists who wanted to see just how many people would attempt to find depth in ballads about frigates and sail-rigging.
But I decided that first impressions are unfair, opted to listen to the rest of two of their albums, Picaresque and Her Majesty, and realized that mine needed only refinement. The Decemberists are either the product of, or identical to, what would happen if an asthmatic, tweed-bedecked nightmare fell hopelessly in love with the highest ranking female member of the British Admiralty, read every Patrick O'Brian novel cover to cover and then referred to them repeatedly while writing interminable odes to studdingsails on the presumption that they must swab her galley.
This conclusion contrasts sharply with the summation they and their fans give on their wikipedia page, which alleges that they are a pop, rock and folk band. "Pop" has long since become a uselessly amorphous word for any band that's not immediately rap, country (unless it's alt-country, and then it's pop that remembers to use a bad accent every third song), electronic or metal. Since the Decemberists aren't any of these, it seems fair to call them pop; but it's also fair to say the same thing of Eddie Murphy and Charles Manson's records, so I don't know how much of an achievement it is to begin with. The Folk distinction also seems worthy, since a majority of their songs seem to take the attitude that an incredibly dull thing emphasizing the drudgery of human existence will become a "quirky" insight into human nature by pretty much exactly describing said drudgery, while doing so near a drum set. Look for their next album to feature a 12-minute suite of four three-minute "fugues" on a theme of leaf-raking, the history of rakes (twig-, wood- and metal-based) and the noble history of those who have raked well nigh since dawn cracked o'er mankind.
Finally, there's the Rock label, which fans modify with the term "progressive," but which still doesn't account for the fact that the band's sole interest in rocking concerns how many redcoats the captain could put in the dinghy for a raiding party without its threatening to capsize. The only other qualifications for Rock status seem to be that some of the band members hold guitars for some of the songs, presumably to rest their accordioning muscles, and that these guitars are strummed laconically whenever the singer needs to pause for two or three refreshing tubercular breaths. At no point do the Decemberists actually ROCK, however, a point which could easily be confirmed by trying to play their music in your driveway while shirtless and working on your car. Even Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull, with their architectural wankery and hobbit-larf balladeering, are bands that for the most part you can credibly work on your car to, under the sun. Try playing the Decemberists while changing your brake pads, within earshot of the neighbors, and you're only going to look like the worst art-fag ironist trolling for sidewalk man-ass.
But I would be remiss if I didn't single out the singer's voice, which could be generously likened to the noise you'd get by pumping air from a punctured bellows across the thin edge of a blade of swamp grass. Even then, to call his voice "reedy" seems like a botanical disservice. Reeds are often strong and extremely useful and rarely make you want to punch yourself in the head for wasting money on them. For one, usually they're free. For another, in the case of a reed like bamboo, you can build a house, thunk people in the head in a kung-fu way, stab allied soldiers or murder them in pit-traps once they get off the beaches, or shove it under the fingernails of a chinamen. About the only thing you can do with the Decemberists' singer-thing's voice is, apparently, record shitty albums or listen to them for fifteen minutes and develop the overwhelming desire to kick him in the crotch to get him to shut up — and also to satisfy an idle curiosity over whether he's got any fucking balls in the first place.
All of this might be excusable if the jaunty non-rock and neurotic non-singing contributed to a piece of art that didn't sound like the worst sort of pastiche fan-poetry. I would quote liberally from their songs here, but I think you can get a better idea of their songwriting by reading a Decemberists song that I wrote by setting an egg timer for five minutes and agreeing to stop wherever I was when the buzzer went off:
- The futtock-shrouds were dull
and unremitting lull
in the doldrums of the western sea
the captain tore down the mast
forbade us our repast
of rum and grog and mead
but when the rain beat down we sang
the injun threw his boomerang
and caught the first mate by the neck
and so we dance, we dance we dance
the fore'mast shivers with the death
of MacNigginy the wank
of MacNigginy the wank
the wank the wank the wank
the wank the wank the wank
the wank...
the wank...
[precocious instrument solo... a xylephone or accordion, whatever sounds like it's clever]
now the ship's near the pole
where we are no one knows
but the captain's rig-a-ma-role
many fairies we have seen
they are aqua--marine
how I long to see the queen
the queen
the queen
she awarded me, the queen
for bravery unseen,
the captain was in a dream
the queen, the queen,
the captain was in a dream
the queen, the queen
look how I mentioned the queen
in a song about boat-ing
my id'iocy's obscene
the queen
the queen the queen the queen
the queen the queen the queen
the queen,
the queen,
the queen the queen the queen
the queen the queen the queen
[repeat vocals at the end of a nasal range until fadeout]
[wittily obscure instrument solo, probably an oboe with a nail in it, until fadeout]
[fade-out everything else — maybe little kids pretending to be banshees or mermaids or something else that has to do with the imagery of another fucking boat and the queen or a "jolly" picaresque character]
[repeat for three albums]
I finished before the timer went off.
What sort of person would enjoy their body of work? Probably an animation student or a film director who's shooting an extended sequence where a bunch of bewitched sailor's skeletons come to life and do a haunted caper or folk dance or mazurka or something, play ghost accordions and games of ghost darts, get in ghost fights with ghost stools over ghost lasses and have to rollick about in a quasi-maudlin way that lets you know that this is both the night of their lives but that they are also ironically aware that they are dead and suffer eternally. Animation or director guy, I highly recommend you pick up some Decemberists' albums and use one of their songs for that scene. There is absolutely nothing else they're good for.
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DMLives@gmail.com
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