The Decemberists – The Hazards Of Love

In my experience, the majority of those individuals who’ve heard The Decemberists fall into one of two camps: love their beautiful music or hate their pretentious music.  The Hazards Of Love isn’t likely to change anyone’s opinion of the band.  Concept albums can be tricky, and are often met with derision by both critics and fans, but The Decemberists pulled one off beautifully with 2006‘s The Crane Wife, so why not try again?  The album was born out of Colin Meloy’s interest in the 1960’s British Folk Revival and subsequent discovery of an Anne Briggs EP entitled The Hazards Of Love.  Initially intending to write a single song, the project exploded into not just a concept album, but a full-blown rock opera.

So the story goes: we are introduced to William (Meloy), a shape-shifting inhabitant of the forest, in the first movement of the four-part title track.  Next is ‘A Bower Scene’ where we discover that William’s love, Margaret, is pregnant with his child, in the typical Meloy lyrical manner: “And when young Margaret’s waistline grew wider/The fruit of her amorous entwine inside her/And so our heroine withdraws to the taiga”.  Next we meet Margaret (voiced by Lavender Diamond’s Becky Stark) as she flees into the forest.  Things are going swimmingly in the taiga until William’s adoptive Forest Queen mother (My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden) arrives in a rage over William’s falling in love with a human.  She grants him one more night with his love but vows to “retake” his life by morning – by which she enlists The Rake to kidnap Margaret. William gives chase, despite his mother’s promise that if he does he will be drowned.  I won’t give away the ending here, but it is The Decemberists, so you can probably figure it out.

There is just so much good stuff happening on this album it’s hard to know where to begin. Colin Meloy’s lyrics keep getting better, and his villains keep getting creepier. We discover that The Rake killed his three children after his wife died giving birth to the fourth, then the Forest Queen (Shara Worden was a superb choice) employs him to kidnap Margaret: “And you have removed this temptation that’s troubled my innocent child/To abduct and abuse and to render adrift and defiled”. The harmonizing on ‘Annan Water’ gives me goosebumps every time, as William pleads with the river to let him cross so as to save Margaret: “If you calm and let me pass/you may render me a wreck when I come back/So calm your waves, slow the churn, and you may have my precious bones on my return”.

There are some grating moments too; while Becky Stark sounds lovely on ‘Won’t Want For Love’, I find her vocals on ‘Isn’t It A Lovely Night’ rather annoying. The children’s choir on ‘The Hazards Of Love 3 (Revenge!)’, while making sense in the context of the song (in which The Rake’s dead children come to haunt him), is a bit cringe-inducing. And while not truly a complaint, but noteworthy, The Hazards Of Love is an all-or-nothing album – I find it impossible to start it without finishing the whole thing.

It’s quite ironic that The Hazards Of Love was born out of the 1960’s folk revival. There are some folky elements, like the gentle guitar melody of the ‘The Hazards Of Love 2 (Wager All)’, the twang of wordless ‘The Queen’s Approach’ or the waltzy accordion in ‘Isn‘t It A Lovely Night?’. For the most part, however, the album suggests that Meloy was listening to a lot of classic metal when he wrote it – with lots of heavy guitars and walls of sound.  At 17 tracks and nearly an hour in length, The Hazards Of Love is definitely a daunting album, and it isn’t something you’re going to want to throw on at a party. But the music is great, the imagery is top-notch, and as a concept album it rivals its predecessor.  And it makes you wonder what exactly Colin Meloy is going to come up with next.
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