No. 3: The Decemberists

English majors get in touch with their inner R.E.M.

Truth be told, I kind of like the symmetry of posting an issue of Late to the Party a few hours late. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not proud of a lot of things, so I don’t see any reason to get down on myself over this one. And you do? What kind of monsters are you?

Aren’t you glad you stopped by today?

This installment is a little different than the others. In the first, I talked about something I didn’t give a fair shake and eventually came to love. In the second, I talked about discovering something I hadn’t experienced at all before. In this one, I’m talking about a band I legitimately tried to enjoy, but just couldn’t. I couldn’t meet them where they were, so I had to wait for them to come to me. There’s a literary or religious allusion there I could make, but I’ll be frank: 90% of my knowledge about religion comes from animated holiday specials or the Simpsons episode where Homer calls him Jebus (Missionary: Impossible; you’re welcome), so I can’t really be much help here. Something something Francis Bacon.

Anyway.

I first heard about the Decemberists when their third album, 2005′s Picaresque, was released. I listened to a few songs. I tracked down some of their older songs. As I did, I came to a single conclusion:

I very much detested this music.

The weird thing is, though, the music has a lot of things I should like, because I like it elsewhere. Narratives. Lyrical complexity. Unabashed intelligence. And yet… nope. I very much appreciate intelligence in music, but I realized something, upon listening to The Crane Wife: pulling it off without showing it off is a very, very hard thing to do. My favourite artists - Radiohead, R.E.M., The National, Bruce Springsteen - balance their fierce intelligence with emotional ties that give a deceiving simplicity. And the Decemberists weren’t. There were cool words, lots of syllables, maybe even some interesting stories. But they weren’t well honed. To me, it felt like the kind of music an undergraduate English student makes the first time he reads himself some Faulkner or Joyce and decides to get inspired.

And as silly as it is, as goofy as I feel writing it down, I bristle at that kind of thing. I don’t think hitting people in the face with your vocabulary is anything other than a peculiar kind of assault. So when a new Decemberists album, The King is Dead, was announced, I figured I’d leave it to the people who would love it and that would be that. No sense in riling myself up, right? Well, then the band appeared on Conan, and I thought, Hey, it’s five minutes of my time, what’s the worst that could happen? As it turns out, those five minutes completely changed my opinion of the band, at least where they’re at right now. Not long after the performance of “Down by the River,” the album’s lead single, I purchased the whole thing on iTunes. Months later, it’s easily the album I’ve listened to most this year.

So what happened?

First things first: they ditched the extraneous syllables. Smart words used well, without being at all silly. It definitely shows growth as a writer for singer Colin Meloy; whereas before I couldn’t get behind his wordplay, here I can. And I am so very, very glad for it.

Second: the sound! Oh, the lovely sound. Shifting from English Revival folk to a rootsier Americana sound - of which I am a considerable fan - the band brought in Gillian Welch, one of my favourite singers, as well as R.E.M.‘s Peter Buck, one of my favourite guitarists. Hell, the rest of the album sounds like a sweet little love letter to Fables of the Reconstruction, with some Automatic for the People thrown in because everybody loves bitchin’ choruses. Right? Right. Then they let loose with some deceptively simple songs that carry a lot of emotional and conceptual complexity without hitting me over the head with it. There’s twang and energy and a lot of catchy songs. It feels like a lot of music I heard when I was a kid, but at the same time different. I sing along. All the time. I can’t stop! I AM SINGING RIGHT NOW.

Dare I say it: I’m a fan.

Now, I don’t know how I’d feel about the old music. I might go back and check it out. I almost definitely will. I expect I’ll soften my opinion, but that it will remain largely unchanged; the words on those albums haven’t changed, after all. But I’m okay with those albums remaining ones that other people love, ones that I might never appreciate as much as their fans. I’m sure there are people who feel the same way about The King Is Dead. Nothing pleases everyone and I’m okay with that. All I know is that right now, I’m happy knowing that I can see something in a band my friends like that I can be happy with, something I can share with them.

I think it would be silly to ask for more.

Let this be a lesson to you, readers: always reconsider your opinions, or at least be willing to. Hell, make it as recursive as you can. Reconsider reconsidering your reconsideration of your opinions. Go nuts. Just be willing to love something you didn’t before.