and they're coming to set me free.
James Taylor once sang, But I can hear a heavenly band full of angels and they're coming to set me free.
The likelihood that The Decemberists took this line from Taylor's Country Road as direct career instruction may seem unlikely at first.
But upon a closer review of the evidence, the assessment that Taylor was prophesizing the band's musical mission some 40 years ahead of time is one of many affirmations that The Decemberists are not really in touch with things such as time and space.
On The King Is Dead, these vast terms of measurement are utterly ignored.
This ignorance is displayed primarily in The Decemberists' ability to make great music that (if it must be filed under a single, unelaborated term) would most easily be categorized as country.
The fact is that for many years now the genre country and the adjective great have been bitter, spiteful foes.
The King Is Dead, first of all, acts as a recognition that country music grew out of American folk music, or the music of the people.
Obviously, The Decemberists have no interest in respecting country's current rulers: dogmatic artists spewing lyrics about fried chicken and good fittin' blue jeans. The band prefers to paint a picture showcasing the beautiful spectrum of sounds and influences that were born from the hills of Appalachia.
Rude, indeed.
The album's second function is to pay reverence to those that inspired the band, with lead vocalist Colin Meloy noting during production the band owed an everlasting admiration and debt to R.E.M. This respect is showcased most audibly in the album's lead single, Down By The Water.
The hero-worship role will become more easily inferred with the James Taylor impressions (January Hymn) and Neil Young tributes (All Arise) that line the album.
And how do the Decemberists choose to pay homage? By doing something else that shows their confusion about what planet they're on and what century it is.
They do so by making an album of 10 simple, succinct, intelligently composed and virtually flawless tracks.
These songs will derive sentimentality utterly absent in the 21st century. Sentimentality not extracted from the melodramatic plot of a Zac Efron movie or the video of the Puggle puppies on YouTube, but one that is rooted in tender lyrics over beautifully constructed music.
Honestly, who do they think they are?
3
Culture
Andy Collier
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