The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists - Review
A Fantasy Concept Album Epic Worthy of Classic Literature
Aug 30, 2009
Like this story's villain, The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists is an epic concept album that sneaks up on the listener.
A full 1:33 of a single haunting note starts the first track, leaving a new listener uneasily checking whether the play button was even pushed.
The first few song offerings tend a tad elusive as well - mostly ballads about the depths of the love between the two protagonists.
But before the audience knows it, the album's complex melodies and vivid lyrics have the attention trussed up, slung over the saddle and galloping off into the woods. This is an album best heard with eyes closed and a good set of headphones clapped over the ears to catch every nuance.
Epic Tragedy Worthy of Classical Authors
The plotline of The Hazards of Love (released March 2009) has pledges of undying love, dire oaths, bitter revenge and tragic endings worthy of Shakespeare.
In keeping with some of their earlier sensibilities, The Hazards of Love bleeds vintage and Victorian charm. Words like "taiga" (not "tiger" - taiga is a subarctic evergreen forest) and "rake" (not the garden implement - an immoral and sexually deviant individual) will send word hounds gleefully reaching for their dictionaries.
The Decemberists' lyrics are (purposefully?) vague, but the gist of the plot is as follows:
The heroine, Margaret, is out riding and encounters a wounded fawn, which magically transforms into a man, William. The two fall quickly in love and Margaret finds herself pregnant. She flees into the taiga to be with her lover.
The plot goes from soupy and sweet to rich and meaty when William's adoptive mother, a demigoddess of sorts named the Forest Queen, confronts her son. She rescued William as a baby and feels betrayed in her wild jealousy that he should ever love another. William pleads with his mother to let him have just one night with Margaret, then he will return to be the queen's forever. The queen agrees.
In the meantime, the villain of the piece makes his entrance - a rake, who calmly relates the story of how he killed his three children by foxglove poisoning, drowning and outright violence just to be free of the responsibility.
Margaret catches his evil eye and the Rake soon abducts her (in an echo of the Decemberists' 2003 song The Bachelor and the Bride - another damsel in the hands of a very-bad-man).
The rake comes up short at the raging Annan Water until the Forest Queen chooses to aid the villain who took this "temptation" from her son. The rake then whisks Margaret off to a fortress to gloat over his victim.
Meanwhile, William faces the same dilemma at the river and opts to make a inevitably fatal bargain with the river itself - let him pass and the river can claim him for death when he returns.
Back at the fortress, the Rake faces his own ghosts as his three children come back from death to destroy him. William rescues Margaret and, true to his oath, returns to the river. There the two lovers make their wedding bed, the river bed.
Musical Moments that Demand Attention
But a raw description doesn't do justice to all the wonderful moments that will give aficionados of good concept albums goosebumps:
- The guitar feedback that crackles with the Forest Queen's wild energy while William pleads for one simple favor.
- The tension-building thrum and clack of the drums during the children's murders in "The Rake's Song", feeling like the soundtrack to a particularly good horror movie.
- The sublime guitar and strings in "An Interlude" that create vivid pictures of William walking through a sunlit forest.
- The urgency created by Counting Crows-style mandolin in "Annan Water."
Available on CD, Vinyl and Digital Formats
The entire album can be heard for free on the Decemberists MySpace page. This is an album that deserves to leave the computer screen and travel with the listener, though.
It's available for $9.99 on iTunes. It's in their copy-protected format. It allows the purchaser to burn a CD, but make sure to select "zero" on space between tracks. Even so, it will put a slight hiccup in between, which is distracting on such a fluid album.
Amazon.com sells the album for $8.99, and it's in the more universal mP3 format. If going with the digital download, a listener needs to make sure to download the booklet under "Extras" on the Decemberists Web site. The Decemberists have clearer lyrics than most, but it helps to have the notes to see who is talking when, and to catch the archaic words correctly.
It's also available on CD for $14.99 or on vinyl for $19.93 at Amazon.
