The Hazards of Love: An album review of the Decemberists.
Do people still care about albums? What do you even call them these days? With advancing technology and ever changing mediums for music, is there anyone who bothers to write an album? Now, this isn’t merely a random collection of songs, but an actual, coherent album that you are supposed to listen to from beginning to end.
We have our iPod Shuffles and iTunes that lets you buy one specific track off an album. The Hazards of Love, the recent album from indie-pop-rockers the Decemberists is not an album for either of those things.
To say that The Hazards of Love is unlike anything you are likely to hear elsewhere is not hyperbole. The band uses instruments and instrumental combinations that very few people have used in rock music or are ever likely to use again. The songs prominently feature the mandolin, the banjo, the accordion, and the electric guitar, often on the same track. Other tracks feature a children’s choir, the alternate, female lead singer as well as the distinctive nasal sound of the regular lead singer.
I asked a question at the beginning of this article: do people still care about albums? The answer to this question will have a huge effect on whether you like the Hazards of Love or not. It is almost impossible to stop listening at the end of a song, since the songs all blend into one another, nearly without seams. To put this album on shuffle is to ruin it, or at least reduce it’s appeal. The cut off points and transitions are such that, if shuffled, or if you start at anything other than track #1, you basically come in in the middle of a song, and the song ends before the actual end.
The advantages of this format is the fact that it allow the Decemberists’ songwriters to tell a story. It is a story about, surprisingly enough, the Hazards of Love, and it is told in the form of a fairy tale. Magical fauns, deals with the devil, parental homicide (think Hansel and Gretel); the story of the album tells of all of these.
But storytelling and nifty format aside, what does the album sound like and is it good? Respectively, the answers are ‘different’ and ‘yes, yes it is’. The best way to describe the sound is to call it a mash-up of old folk songs and modern rock. Not folk music, mind you, but actual folk songs: Mary Mary Quite Contrary and London Bridge is Falling Down.
So I urge you, if you like innovative, interesting music, if you like your songs to tell stories, or if you are just looking for something different, buy this album. Buy this whole album. Do not trust to get a fair representation from a single song, and certainly not the 30 second previews on iTunes.
