It just so happens that just when REM have made a public appearance and even a small performance, we have a new album from Decemberists. The first in 6 years. Or maybe there are no coincidences. After all, Mike Mills sings backing vocals on the last track of ‘As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again’.
Like REM before them, the Decemberists have been exploring Americana since the 2000s with a foundation of indie pop, country, folk and derivatives. In their case, with river songs that could stretch to 9 minutes, like the enormous ‘The Mariner’s Revenge Song’ from ‘Picaresque’, or those tracks from ‘The Crane Wife’ that lasted 12 minutes.
With ‘The King Is Dead’ they became number 1 on the Billboard 200 and went gold in the United States. The albums became more spaced out and in some way they have been lowering their profile. But this is one of his best releases, as well as a return to his classic sound after the electronic experiments of the previous album.
‘As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again’ has, as its first incentive, a couple of perfect indie pop songs. The single ‘Burial Ground’, in collaboration with James Mercer, is a composition so resplendent that it could actually be a song by The Shins. And he talks about death, yes, in a resigned and fun way: “This world is terrible, so let’s go to where we belong (…) bring the music system, let’s stay in the cemetery.”
‘Long White Veil’ could also have been the first single from the album, another gloomy song about the death of a girlfriend that knows how to sound happy. It is one of their most pop songs, to the point that it allows comparisons with the Smiths
. Afterwards, the influences are more disparate. Another song that talks about a bride attacked at a bloody wedding, ‘Oh No!’, does it to a Latin rhythm, very connected to Mexico, and with the typical American humor of Decemberists: “who will join him in the ambulance?” .
If with its psychedelic flute, ‘The Reapers’ is a bucolic vindication of the people who work in the fields, ‘William Fitzwilliam’, with country sounds, is inspired by the death of John Prine and a book by Hilary Mantel, ‘The thunder in the kingdom’. Decemberists have always had long stories, and that is why this time they close their album with a song of more than 19 minutes, inspired by ‘The Book of Joan’ by Lidia Yuknavitch, with its inevitable ambient passage and its inevitable final explosion.
That very Decemberist closing is counterbalanced with some of the most immediate, beautiful, accessible compositions that good old Colin Meloy has ever written. ‘Don’t Go to the Woods’ manages to sound as intriguing as its name; ‘All I Want Is You’ is simply defined as one of his very few love songs; ‘America Made Me’ is another of those 60’s productions, reflecting on what their “country” means to them; ‘Born to the Morning’ is the Beatlian rock song that the second part of the album needed… and what can we say about the state of Colin’s voice. There will be those who prefer it in a sweet way, there will be those who prefer it in a torn way, but how much we had missed it.
