Re-sleeve that album cover! Disregard those silly liner-note photographs! Never you mind the Decemberists' attempts at theatricality-- Picaresque is the band's least stagy, most serious, and most accomplished effort yet. It's also as good a follow-up to Her Majesty the Decemberists any devoted fan could hope for. On that previous effort, head insurgent Colin Meloy proclaimed, "I was meant for the stage," and indeed the songs sounded like production numbers performed by eager actors in a cramped playhouse. That album still retains its considerable charm, but the Decemberists sounded less like a band than a traveling troupe at the behest of fickle royalty.
Picaresque easily dispels such limitations. Here, as he plaintively proclaims on "The Engine Driver", Meloy is "a writer, a writer of fictions." As its title suggests, the album collects a compendium's worth of well-crafted story-songs, most of which sound more literary than theatrical (the nearly nine-minute "Mariner's Revenge Song" excepted). In other words, the Decemberists are no longer the indie rock version of the Max Fischer Players; these songs are content to be songs, not one-acts, and the music is music, not sonic scenery. As a result, Picaresque sounds similar to Castaways and Cutouts and their live shows: The music is more dynamic and all the more evocative for not attempting to romantically conjure the past and filter it through Meloy's imagination. Despite some historical backdrops, most of these narratives are set in the here and now, a milieu that suits the band very well.
The spring in the band's collective step here may be somewhat aided by Chris Walla's crisp production, but I imagine it's mostly the achievement of the band itself, who sharpened their teeth on last year's mini-LP The Tain and now tend to Meloy's songs like bodyguards trotting alongside the presidential limousine. Chris Funk packs an arsenal of exotic instruments, brandishing his bouzouki, hurdy-gurdy, and dulcimer like firearms, and Rachel Blumberg, in her farewell performance (she has left to concentrate on her band Norfolk and Western) proves a capable foil for Meloy, her voice blending nicely with his on "From My One True Love (Lost at Sea)" and "The Mariner's Revenge Song". She also adds thunderous momentum to the opening "The Infanta", a heartbreak pulse to the quieter parts of "On the Bus Mall", and an athletic shuffle to "The Sporting Life", and her hi-hat decorates "We Both Go Down Together" like jewels on a lover's necklace.
In developing into such a formidable flock, the Decemberists not only have far outstripped those ridiculous comparisons to Neutral Milk Hotel that dogged Her Majesty, but have also allowed Meloy to widen his lyrical scope and hone his ambitious narratives. He remains enamored with tawny historical verisimilitudes, which inform the devastating "Eli, the Barrow Boy", "The Infanta", and "The Mariner's Revenge Song" (the latter of which, legend has it, was recorded live around a single mic). But much of his chosen subject matter sounds startlingly contemporary, even if these songs still confront the familiar theme of impossible love.
A cousin to Belle and Sebastian's "The Stars of Track & Field", "The Sporting Life" views the roaring crowds, disapproving parents, unfaithful girlfriend, and disappointed coach from the vantage of an averse athlete lying injured on the field, and "The Bagman's Gambit" conjures a compromised U.S. government, a D.C. where everyone is for sale, as a backdrop for the story of a government official in love with a spy. Meloy's acoustic guitar is delicate here, while the band churns a car-chase momentum climaxing in a nightmarish freakout that sounds like Manchurian Candidate dementia triggered by "A Day in the Life".
Perhaps the best song he's written, "On the Bus Mall" is Meloy's own private Idaho full of boy gigolos amok in the city, and he evocatively contrasts their innocent affection ("Here in our hovel we fused like a family") with the grittiness of their lives: "You learned quick to make a fast buck/ In bathrooms and barrooms, on dumpsters and heirlooms/ We bit our tongues/ Sucked our lips into our lungs 'til we were falling/ Such was our calling."
The one standout, the apple among the oranges, is "16 Military Wives", which on first listen doesn't seem to fit the Picaresque aesthetic. It's not a story, but a protest song that uses a slick horn line and Meloy's loosest vocals yet (I distinctly hear a "whoo!") to tally the mathematics of war-- plus dollars, minus lives. But it's the sequencing that allows Meloy to work this aside into the album's larger mission: Following "To My Own True Love (Lost at Sea)", about futilely awaiting a lover's return, it becomes clear that the narrator could be one of the "five military wives" left widowed by "14 cannibal kings" while "15 pristine moderate liberal minds" look on helplessly. This is a new side of the Decemberists: angry, impassioned, and more in touch with the world than ever.
