The Decemberists, "The Crane Wife"
The Decemberists are a weird band, I'll admit. To my knowledge, there aren't many other bands producing 11-minute maritime revenge tales that feature sequences in which the narrator spends a lengthy amount of time in the belly of a whale.
But, you know, that's what makes them likable.
This album, their first major-label release, has a lot of those likable moments -- some of the best in my estimation. It also has some of the biggest steps forward for the band, from novelty act to straight-up rock band. But it also falls short in several places. Essentially, it's an unenevenly great record.
If you were to play the first three and last two tracks on the disc without playing the middle part, you'd have a damn near perfect record. And those songs do take up a considerable amount of the album's runtime, considering that two of them are multi-part movements that last well over ten minutes. "The Crane Wife 1, 2 & 3" and "Sons and Daughters" are very much standard Decemberists music, and that is to say they're very good. Sad, great songs.
But what really stands out to me is the second track -- a movement of four songs, all of which are very different in style and sound. Especially strange is the first part of the track, "The Island," which starts with -- I'm not kidding -- a Grand Funk Railroad-style bass breakdown. It's wild and pretty great.
As for the middle of the album, some of it's bad, some of it's derivative, and some of it's just spotty. "O Valencia!" is a very nice little love song that tells the star-crossed lovers story quite well, but is also somewhat forgettable. "The Perfect Crime" is an attempt to move into a poppier-80s style sound that doesn't really work so well for the band. "When the War Came" just sounds too much like Led Zeppelin's "No Quarter" for me to listen to and not think, "Hey, this sounds like 'No Quarter.'" And "Shankhill Butchers" is a neat little creepy song that one would imagine singing to a child to get them to eat their broccoli. So it serves a purpose, I guess. "Summersong" I barely remember.
But a couple more words about the three parts of "The Crane Wife" series of songs. They're beautiful. When I said they're standard Decemberists songs, I didn't mean to say they were average in any way. They're simply great songs and they tell a compelling story.
In the end, I think the good outweighs the bad on this record. I wish there was more of the good Decemberists and less of the band who seems to be trying to impress a major label. B-.