Listening to an album by the Decemberists is like listening to a master storyteller. However, the band's singer-songwriter Colin Meloy never holds your hand and offers you a bedtime story. He throws you headfirst into tales of murder, revenge and star-crossed lovers, often leaving listeners shocked with ghoulish delight. This has never been as true as it is with the Decemberists' fifth album, The Hazards of Love.
The style of the album is more rock opera than a traditional set of songs. Several of the tracks were originally written for a musical Meloy intended to create. After eventually declaring the work ""unstageable,"" he turned the songs into The Hazards of Love.
Because of this, the 17 tracks on the album follow a story, the tale of a woman named Margaret, her forbidden lover and the villains who interfere to keep them apart. Just as the title tracks from the band's last album, The Crane Wife, were based on a Japanese folktale, the ‘plot' of The Hazards of Love was drawn from numerous English ballads and the maniacal inner workings of Colin Meloy's mind.
These unusual beginnings do not in any way make the album campy or over the top; after all, the Decemberists have a tradition of telling sordid epics through their music. Rather, it allows them to fully explore a narrative's nuances and they take full advantage, creating specific sounds that relate to the characters of the story and threading them throughout the album to tie it together and add depth.
A highlight of the album is the inclusion of Shara Worden (from My Brightest Diamond) singing as the forest queen. Her throaty voice fits perfectly, lending credibility to her character's claim of regal authority. Her songs are backed by distorted guitar, which adds a sinister weight to her lyrics and displays an evolution of the Decemberists' usual style.
Another addition to the usual group is Becky Stark singing as Margaret, providing a high reedy voice as a contrast to Worden's, which works well with the pretty, meandering love ballads she sings.
The choice to create a narrative album does have the disadvantage of allowing for fewer solid, single-worthy tracks. Since the songs are woven together, it works better to listen to the album as a whole in order to get the full effect. Still, some tracks can't be held down by the overarching plot, such as the villainous ""The Rake's Song"" and the ballad-esque ""The Hazards of Love 1 (The Prettiest Whistles Won't Wrestle the Thistles Undone).""
Perhaps Colin Meloy thought The Hazards of Love was unstageable, but the band still manages to pull together a clever tale of true love and its trials in an album that is a welcome addition to the band's literary legacy.
