Review: The Decemberists - The Crane Wife

"By land, by sea, by dirigible..." Once again, The Decemberists have produced an album that, like any good hallucinogen, transcends the listener through space, time, and history. - by Will Levenson

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I know this review is coming a bit late, but to be honest it's taken me some time to put words to the way I feel about the new Decemberists album, The Crane Wife. I mean, if you knew me you'd realize how huge it is that I'm speechless. A few albums have struck me like this one, and those are things like Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, TV on the Radio's Return to Cookie Mountain, or pretty much any album released by Radiohead. There are just moments in music that are so difficult to define that it's almost a disservice to even try. But at the risk of perverting the brilliance of The Crane Wife, diminishing or misinterpreting it, I'm going to tell you about one of the best albums of 2006.

Unlike the Decemberists' previous LPs, The Crane Wife is most similar to their concept EP The Tain. By that, I mean that there are narrative themes running throughout the album, and it seems to reference itself constantly. The songs are all epics--it's not hard to believe when two of them are over 10 minutes long!--with incredible stories and even more incredible music. The new production value serves them well--it's their first album on a major label--and instead of downplaying their eccentricities and becoming more "pop", Colin Meloy and co. have found the happy medium between their unique form of musical expression and a more coherent sound traveling throughout the album.

This is the first time we have a full Decemberists EP without a sea shanty. This doesn't mean their material has changed--they are still writing about things like the Civil War and anti-Catholic serial murderers. Their style has changed though. But unlike some really horrific style changes--dare I invoke the name Plans?--the Decemberists have seemed to evolve, to adapt and grow and mature like truly legendary artists do.

So let's get down to specifics. The album starts with a beautiful piece called "The Crane Wife 3", which is the final piece of the 3-part Crane Wife "trilogy"--the first two parts come as the penultimate track. The second song on the album is a three-part epic that reads like a mini-Tain. This track introduces one of the Decemberists' newly evolved toys--the organ, which they utilize in fantastic ways. The rest of the album is filled with songs about doomed love affairs, criminal conspiracies, and, of course, a Japanese folktale called "The Crane Wife."

I don't know what else I can say about this album. Anything I can say is simply describing the basics of it, not the nuances and subtleties that enrich the album, filling it to the brim with a pulse and a life the likes of which I haven't seen in music for years. It's albums like this that can change genres, that can redefine what popular music can do and where it may go.

The last song on the album is a piece about hope, about the time when war is finally over and we can all find that place where the echoes of war can no longer reach us. It ends with a refrain of the line: "Hear all the bombs fade away..." Until that time comes, we can drown out the bleating sounds of rhetoric with the soothing, inspiring album The Crane Wife.

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