The Decemberists – heavily bearded indie folkers with a fondness for military regalia and songs about chimney sweeps – have always seemed about two degrees away from parody, but the sheer quality and honesty of their songwriting has ever rescued them. New album What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World (quite possibly their best, in my opinion) opens with “The Singer Addresses His Audience”, a cheerfully direct statement that “we had to change some” before immediately launching into a song called “Cavalry Captain”. So, um, not that much then.
It’s a design they stick to when they take the stage at Brixton, with singer Colin Meloy starting off alone on stage performing “The Singer” and the rest of the band gradually coming on and adding to the song’s layering until they’re all on, the audience are ready, and they follow straight into the upbeat “Calvary Captain”. It’s a simple, effective way of starting a set that largely focuses on the band’s talent for crowdpleasing, heavily theatrical tunes.
More than half of the new album gets an outing, from the haunting, stark subtleties of “Carolina Low” and “12.17.12” to the lush doo-wop of “Philomena” and the gorgeous new single “Make You Better”. But aside from that, the band focuses on older tracks (their 2010 number 1 album The King is Dead only offers up two songs of a packed set) with a heavy bias towards their storytelling-style tunes like “The Legionnaire’s Lament” or “The Rake’s Song” (“Don’t cheer that one,” grins Meloy after they finish it, “it’s a horrible song. It’s about infanticide!”)
Meloy himself proves an admirable ringleader, encouraging the crowd to cheer his bandmates at appropriate moments and constructing some quite complex audience participation, elevating the aforementioned “Rake’s Song” with carefully controlled clapping, one half of the room at one tempo and one half at another. Admittedly he then overdoes it and causes “16 Military Wives” to go on for far too long with a call-and-response section, but points for effort. He also provides some fun between-song anecdotes, explaining how songs can mutate by playing a song he originally wrote to get his recalcitrant son to eat some breakfast. “Hank, eat your oatmeal,” he croons, before adding in a distinctive “awooo” that the audience knows and cheers – the oatmeal song became “Calamity Song”, which they then play.
Unfortunately, the set wavers as it goes on, losing a little focus towards the middle before regaining traction for the encore and the apparent climax of the new album’s glorious closer, “A Beginning Song”. But this is a Decemberists gig, after all, so there’s a second encore to play their signature tune. (“You want it, and you deserve it,” notes Meloy.) “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” is presented as demented pantomime, with the band members acting out parts on stage, running round madly to reach the seeming dozens of instruments required to play it (and then reach the microphones to sing appropriate sections) and getting the audience to scream in terror at the appropriate moment to simulate the crew of two ships being swallowed by a giant whale. As I said, always two degrees away from parody. But their verve and humanity stops them from being arch or ironic, and the cheers are well-earned.
The actual highlight, though, is a nice surprise early in the set. Surely no-one was expecting them to play their twelve-minute, three-part epic “The Island”? But here it is, its riffs, relatively restrained on record, becoming a bludgeoning wall of sound. Startlingly heavy for a band known to sing about being “terminally fey”, the wig-out combines with some sterling work from Brixton’s lighting crew to create a swamp-rock maelstrom that, when paired with the bleak lyrics, makes you half-expect True Detective’s Rust Cohle to stagger across the stage in bewildered existential terror. An unanticipated and warmly received peak of a set that occasionally stumbles but always rights itself.
The Decemberists – Sixteen Military Wives on MUZU.TV.