Colin Meloy can read. This fact should surprise no one who has heard the Decemberists, or who has only so much as read one of their press clippings, nearly all of which seem bound, as if by secret contract, to make mention of the music as "literate." It's shorthand, of course, for Meloy's tendency towards narrative and metaphor and occasionally inscrutable vocabulary-- a way for writers to telegraph his interest in words without indulging in much of the same.
The matter of the L-word has been the primary talking point about the band since Portland's HUSH records released their first EP nearly a decade ago, joined in 2006 by their signing to Capitol, and earlier this year by the somewhat surprising debut of their sixth album at number one on the Billboard charts. Somewhere in there, too, is nearly always talk of Meloy's glasses (well, he wears them) and a mention of the band's fans, usually classified as gawking drama-club nerds (which are indeed there, though for a while now the crowds at their live shows have been comprised less of folks in "three-button vests" and more in just plain t-shirts, usually also in pants). To echo an old trope (one that sounds, by coincidence, like the premise of a Decemberists song), the cobbler's children have no shoes: The band that's done more than almost any other in recent years for the art of narrative songcraft can't seem to get a decent story told about its own damn self.
But the release of Long Live the King, the follow-up EP to the chart-topping The King Is Dead, offers as good a chance as we may get for a while to pause and take stock of what we might have been missing. The six songs comprise a few nearly-fleshed-out tracks and one demo rescued from the cutting-room floor (plus a previously-released cover of the Grateful Dead's "Row Jimmy", which the band sounds like they had a good time recording, making it at least a slight improvement over any of the seven hundred thousand versions of the Dead's original). It's not a cohesive artistic effort so much as a jumble of remainders-- unhemmed, lots of loose strings. Still, like rifling through a quilter's scrap bag, it's easy to see what bits were trimmed off from where, and worth it to see how they now might be put to their own uses.
Even moreso than the album they were axed from, these songs are heavy on the literary references; "Sonnet", in particular, reconstitutes a Dantean ode to bromance as a jaunty folk romp, punctuated by the welcome, if not a bit startling, appearance of a horn section. But as always, the bookish nods aren't the most interesting things going. Running throughout The King Is Dead and present here too are some striking examples of what may be Meloy's secret strength as a songwriter: not the dispatching of triple-word-score contenders or the re-imagining of ancient archetypes, but the mining of the emotional and physical expanses that separate and unite his characters, who seem to be growing more and more real all the time. Turns out, the fabulist is a humanist, too.
Earlier Decemberists songs tended towards thumbnail sketches of individuals-- ghost-babies, destitute barrow boys, slain soldiers. The scope was narrow, a few degrees removed from reality, and focused on death. On Long Live the King, though, when there is killing, we remain fully topside of the grave, and though it may not always be brighter, the emphasis is on the living. More and more now there are songs about "we's," about collective efforts, about sharing the load. (It's not surprising, then, that the stage musical Meloy has been working on for years is about an early-20th-century miners' strike.) The King Is Dead opened with "Don't Carry It All" and its cryptic reassurance that "we are all our hands and holders," and while there's nothing so frankly heartening on the EP, the spirit appears in flashes.
Everything here is a group effort: the murder of "E. Watson", the interring of "Burying Davy". These two opening tracks have less of the sunny, rough-handed looseness of the best tracks of The King Is Dead, perhaps explaining their exclusion. Texturally and technically, the shambly home recording of "I4U & U4ME" sounds more like a lost track from Meloy's college band Tarkio; it's been since "Angel, Won't You Call Me?", on The Decemberists' very first EP, that he, in character or otherwise, has offered himself for a romantic partnership with such indifference: "We could go together some/ And we could get each other through the night." It's a jangly, sweet, impatient song, and it's a bummer that it may languish here in demo form for all time; if anything, it would be great to have version where "fouled up," on the pre-chorus, becomes "fucked up," which it seems so badly to want to be.
"Foregone" is one of Meloy's more directly personal lyrics, and while it might've been right at home on the LP with its shuffling swagger and twanging pedal steel, coupled with "Rise to Me" it would have made two references to Meloy's son Henry in one song-cycle. This might be edging a little too close to home for a band whose previous album, after all, exclusively detailed the troubled love life of a shape-shifting foster son of an evil fairy queen. (Like it or not, and many will not, echoes of The Hazards of Love still linger here: "Burying Davy" is taut and ominous, the band seeming happy to slip back into the prog-folk murk that this writer occasionally feels pretty lonely in not considering a total career misstep.)
Earlier this year, casual mentions of an extended Decemberists hiatus were met with knuckle-gnawing from fans, but especially given this EP, those laments seem premature. The act is a collective of its own, of course, and right now there are other things to tend to: Meloy is writing a young-adult book series; drummer John Moen, bassist Nate Query and guitarist Chris Funk all juggle a number of other bands, as does organist Jenny Conlee, who we're happy to hear has kicked her breast cancer into remission. This isn't the sound of a band closing up shop so much as tidying up the workbench before stepping out for a while. Long Live the King would surely have been an apt title for a swan song, but this isn't one.
