Won’t Want for Rock: A Review of the Decemberists’ The Hazards of Love [2009]

I decided to share my recent review of my favourite band's latest release, soon to be published in the Davidson Reader.

In the middle of the Decemberists’ fourth full-length release, The Hazards of Love, the song “An Interlude” provides one minute and forty seconds of quiet, instrumental relief. It’s a necessary pause in an album that barely lets up on pounding guitars and intense vocals. With The Hazards of Love, the Decemberists leave their well-trodden, comfortable territory of sprightly indie pop and enter the darker rock land that they explored with their 2004 EP, The Tain.
Like The Tain, The Hazards of Love is a tightly-wound concept album, centered around the much-wronged character Margaret. Listeners familiar with lead singer Colin Meloy’s distinctive elocution may find the presence of two female guest singers, Becky Stark as Margaret and Shara Worden (from My Brightest Diamond) as the evil queen, jarring at first. However, these female vocals mesh neatly with Colin’s and provide a rich avenue for the complex and morbid lyrics.
“Prelude” opens the album with nearly a full minute of silence; a deep resonance gradually awakens with a threatening atmosphere reminiscent of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. Soon the track cuts seamlessly into “The Hazards of Love 1 (The Prettiest Whistles Won't Wrestle the Thistles Undone)” as Margaret’s tale of woe begins. There are three encores of the main “The Hazards of Love” theme as the album continues.
The advance single for the album was “The Rake’s Song,” about a murderous young father, easily the creepiest song on The Hazards of Love. His victims make a re-appearance in “The Hazards of Love 3 (Revenge)” as a bone-chilling children’s chorus join the already expanded ranks of vocalists. The album’s longest track is “The Wanting Comes in Waves / Repaid,” but this is no “California One / Youth and Beauty Brigade.” Instead, Colin and Shara take turns in a duet of debts and desire.
Still, The Hazards of Love is not a release to be sampled in morsels; it is intended to be a complete experience for listening from beginning to end. Tellingly, the Decemberists played the entirety of the album during their concert at SXSW; unlike most concerts where artists play a mix of new songs from the latest release and some old favorites, this one featured solely the tracklisting straight from the album. Only after an encore did Colin play two older songs. Just as that audience in the concert experienced, taking in the music during one fell swoop is the best way to appreciate The Hazards of Love.

My Window Is Open

Erm.

Sorry for the long pause in blogging! I have not been sitting idle, I promise. What have I been doing? Well -- traveling to Berlin, Lyon, cycling to Villandry, and re-discovering Normandy, for starters. Also, wrapping up my semester and preparing to return to the U.S. (!) in less than a month. I have loved my year abroad (lack of blogging updates notwithstanding) but still miss my friends and family.

I've also discovered Twitter (see side bar for the link). Now, I was always one of those people who thought Twitter was strange and faddish, but then I saw the error of my ways. It was my sister who piqued my interest in joining that group. However, I still refuse to use the words "twitterverse" and "tweet" (urgh) since they just sound horrid.

It's strange to request post topics, but is there something I should blog about? The parts of France I love and the parts that are "challenging"? The joys of public gardens and amorous teenagers? The amusement of badly-dubbed television? Tell me.

BBC Meme

Oh memes. I usually ignore them, but this one was too fun (got a link to it via Facebook). It's a booklist, ostensibly from the BBC, though I have my doubts.

"The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Add a '- ' to the ones you HATE.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

I'm also going to put an * by the ones I plan to read.

Then tag however many people you want and read their responses:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x +
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x +
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x +
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x +
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x +
6 The Bible x +
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x +
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens x
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (some, not all of them) x +
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier x+
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x+
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger x +
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger x +
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot *
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams x +
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh x +
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis x +
34 Emma - Jane Austen x +
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen x +
36 The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden x
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown x
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood x +
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan *
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel x -
52 Dune - Frank Herbert x
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons *
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen x +
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens *
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck x
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt x
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas x
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac *
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding x
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville x
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker x
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x +
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath *
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt *
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery x +
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas *
98 Beloved - Toni Morrison
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo x +

Total read: 49


OK. This list looks rather uneven to me. What is The Five People You Meet in Heaven doing next to Sherlock Holmes? I'm getting flashbacks to the Humanities curriculum, which seemed to think five female authors sufficient for a two-year study of literature and history. Anyway. I do have a quite a few classics to read still!

And now, a musical interlude

I have been enjoying my Paste VIP Winter DVD Sampler. The musics videos have been a delight (with a few mediocre numbers -- Matt Costa, I'm talking to you) and I thought I'd share two favourites below. Both song titles start with "How" which is coincidental.

First, one from Greg Laswell:


And then a delightful ditty from The Watson Twins:


Enjoy!

Getting Things Done

I've previously mentioned the Getting Things Done system, but it deserves another shout-out. It truly made a revolutionary difference on how I look at tasks and projects. I was never a big to-do list person (though I did enjoy writing things down after they were done so I could still check them off) but since reading GTD, I am convinced of their value when used correctly.

After doing the "index cards held by a binder clip" system for a while (known on the street as a Hipster PDA), I decided to kick things up a notch (but affordably!). With a little postcard taping and fancy writing, I put together a spanking-new system that I quite like. I tried having little tabs to demark each section at the top, but found that they simply got too mangled in my bag and it looked messy (and I am never messy...never) so I just took them out.

Studies

St. Joan of Arc has fascinated me since primary school; she is one of the original female warrior figures, before superheros were invented and before Tolkien wrote about Eowyn and her prowess on the battlefield. Besides her obvious courage in war and perseverance, I've always been inspired by her determination and resolve as a young woman, though she was considered simple and uneducated by those around her.

Now that I am in her homeland, I will be doing an independent study this semester about her life and work, which I will chronicle at Jeanne la Pucelle. If anyone has recommendations on good Joan-related books that I ought to read, I would love to hear about it.

Live from Paris (well, sort of live)

So, the long-awaited parental visit to Paris was awesome.

Those of you who keep up with Parisian weather reports (don't try to pretend you don't...) may have read that Paris had a "tempest" on Friday. Yes, we were there.



Photos are here, with more on the way.