At First Listen: The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love

At First Listen, Which I just invented is where the members of the Fajita Monday Constigency talk about newly released albums after only one listen.

I had been anxiously anticipating the new Decemberists release for quite some time.  They’ve always been one of my favorite bands and when I heard they were coming out with a rock opera I was…nervous to say the least.  I felt like The Crane Wife was a C album at best.  It had a handful of decent tracks, a couple good ones, and the rest were pretty bad.  I am one of those hipster assholes who says their best work was their old stuff.  Castaways and Cutouts is one of my favorite albums ever released.  It was the simplest album featuring a band of 5 members I have ever heard.

The band’s newest album, The Hazards of Love was released on iTunes yesterday.  I downloaded it, and gave it a first listen last night.  I twitted some of my thoughts on it and I’d like to expand upon those twits and give some more thoughts:

17 tracks at just under an hour of play time.  This is not a conventional Decemberists album.  The last album had 2 songs over 10 minutes!  This one has 2 songs that just barely go over 4 minutes.  What I loved about The Decemberists since I started listening to them was that they took their ideas and expanded upon them into epics.

(see: The Mariner’s Revenge Song or The Gymnast, High Above the Ground)

I felt like this album doesn’t let those ideas develop properly.  For example, “Isn’t it a Lovely Night” was easily my favorite track on the album on my first listen but at just a hair over 3 minutes, I felt like I didn’t get enough of it. I was just starting to get into it when it faded back into the Led Zeppelin/White Stripes-ian killer rock riffs that carry through the whole piece.  If that song was 5 minutes long it would probably be one of my favorite songs by them.

One of the tracks on the album; “The Rake Song” was released as the first single off the album a couple months ago.  I think I enjoyed it more in the context of a single than in the album.  It actually had made me excited for the album to come out.  I thought it was a great first step.  But I also got to have a couple dozen listens of it.  Im interested to see how this album grows on me.

This is not an album to pull singles off of and probably won’t have as many girlfriend mixtape tracks than previous albums (See: Red Right Angle, The Engine Driver, We Both Go Down Together, O’ New England, Here I Dreamt I was an Architect, et al)

And that’s a sad sad truth.

by roninpowride
2 years ago