The Decemberists: "Down by the Water"

It used to be I sat by the computer watching the week-long crawl of the Decemberists’ sample tracks download over Audiogalaxy, waiting with nothing short of fanatical verve. It’s been many, many moon since then, and many moon since I even retreated to the slightly more humble-sounding Tarkio recordings, just before outgrowing the Decemberists altogether. Mostly because Colin Meloy just got to be too big a pill to swallow.

So there were a few hesitations, a little hemming and hawing going on, before I listened to the newly released track off upcoming album The King is Dead. And when I was done with the hemming and hawing and gave it a listen, it boxed me in the ear with a hand I just never saw coming.

Even in the fanatical days, while I could get over them sounding a little circus-y, I had a hard time coming to grips with the way Meloy often left songs in dire need of some critical editing that Meloy in the past just couldn’t muster. Or didn’t seem to want to muster, to varying levels of success? For instance: the charming way content over-spills the boundaries of the songs. Meanwhile more hindering, distracting blindspots scuffed up my affection for them in more detrimental ways. “I Dreamt I Was an Architect”—what I’d consider my first and favorite track—was marred, for instance, by the awful “unparalleled” pun that even Meloy himself seemed to catch on, second guess, or just gulp/wince at in the split-second before he sang it. Such were small, easily amendable flaws still capable of completely snapping me out of the song’s story.

And Colin Meloy’s wheelhouse is nothing if not lush narrative. For whatever flaws, he is one hell of a storyteller—and at times an effusive logophile. That dude just could not seem to help himself. Increasingly so. But, listening to “Down by the Water,” now it seems like he’s uncharacteristically, practically edited himself right out of the picture, leaving what’s more like a Gillian Welch song featuring the Decemberists. (Oh, and Peter Buck of R.E.M.) Even vocally removed, Meloy sounds like he’s singing through a spaghetti strainer.

With a Blues Traveler harmonica that kicks off the opening and fades back to only make the occasional appearance, “Down by the Water” is a surprisingly country-tinged endeavor for the band, right down to Veirs’ vocals replaced by Gillian Welch’s toast-dry, folksy harmony. It’s an interesting addition, but her voice never travels far from Meloy’s and Meloy’s never travels far from the song’s stringently laid-out path. And the song’s laid-out path never travels far itself. Stripped of the Decemberists’ usual imaginative trajectory, it’s bare-bones and chorus-heavy, with the magical-realism-gone-wild replaced by a hinting remorse that’s more akin to the casual-listening-friendly structure and content of any song off, say, Whiskeytown’s Stranger’s Almanac (1997). Often over-run by the frequency of chorus, when the story is present it’s nebulous, difficult to discern, and given a relatively clipped track length. It’s all over before I’ve grasped it, with very little enticing me back for a second go.

Their sense of showmanship has always taken a front seat. It was always different and it was always so crammed full of imagery; it was hard to not be drawn in at least by Meloy’s vocab calisthenics. In trimming back in that sense, as well as in every other sense, they’ve possibly swung too far in the extremes, from the under-edited to the over-edited, especially considering their least-edited and egregiously indulgent operetta that was, previously released, Hazards of Love. They seem contrastingly corralled by the chorus and verse, vocals never trickling over or blatantly gunning for extra verbiage. Meloy’s kind of handed his band’s identity over to his guests—though this also gives way to the one refreshing turn I can pinpoint for the Decemberists.

Though the loss of content, loss of story, and sense of two-dimensionality is surprising, there is the nice addition of a deflated sense of Meloy’s normally puffed-up hubris—he even seems to vocally rub his own nose in the dirt on the odd key shifts in his voice, sounding a little more rough-hewn than in the past. A little more world-weary. While the song is sadly what comes off as a would-be filler track on any of their former albums (had they been thrust into country territory), the element that is Meloy himself I’m finding more digestible than ever. Whether or not it’s possible to have a digestible Meloy and an interesting Meloy co-exist in the same song remains to be seen. And is reason enough to maybe hold out hope for The King is Dead.