The Decemberists

You’re going to love it or you’re going to hate it. You either hung out with this guy in school or you made fun of him. I’m here to tell you, it doesn’t have to be this way. I’m a reformed Decemberists basher myself. The wee band from Portland is easy to pick on, to be sure. But if you give their tender melodies and ornate lyrical tales a chance, you’ll find the inner truths and beauty. Maybe it took reading Colin Melloy’s (lead singer/songwriter) book on a seminal album by The Replacements (Let it Be), to feel like I could relate to him. But I’m hooked on their feeling now.

Bittersweet bouncing fun abounds on "The Sporting Life" and "We Both Go Down Together." Start with these two accessible tracks if you are still wary of The Decemberists. But don’t stop there, matey. Hop on board for this journey into the belly of a whale. Part history text, part folk pop art, Picaresque is mostly all good. It evokes images of your high school production of the HMS Pinafore. You’ll play Ahab and Jonah and the last kid picked for the team.

When everything starts to sound the same, give this disc a spin. It’s certainly different. - Jeff Kamin

"The Infanta," the thunderous opening track on the Decemberists' fluid and predictably studious Picaresque, rolls in like a ghost ship at 40 knots in a hail of cannon fire with a mad English professor at the wheel. Colin Meloy and his esteemed West Coast colleagues have no qualms about beginning their third full-length record with a processional about a child monarch, and it's a testimony to their talents as orators and interpreters of both the absurd and the mundane that they continue to assimilate more fans than they alienate. While Picaresque follows its predecessor's -- the treacly Her Majesty -- predilection for seafaring and mythology, its boot-covered feet are more firmly planted in the present, resulting in the group's most accessible -- and decidedly upbeat -- product to date. The rollicking "16 Military Wives," the aforementioned "Infanta," and "The Sporting Live" (which comes dangerously close to Belle & Sebastian's "Stars of Track and Field") help balance the spooky atmospherics of more reserved cuts like "From My Own True Love (Lost at Sea)" and "Eli, the Barrow Boy." The Decemberists have always excelled at midtempo British folk-inspired dream pop, and Picaresque is no exception, as the brooding "We Both Go Down Together," which sounds like a mist-drenched Pacific Northwest rendering of R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion," and the wistful "Engine Driver" rank among the group's finest offerings. The album concludes with the diabolical "Mariner's Revenge Song," a Tin Pan Alley dirge/operetta reminiscent of Kurt Weill's "The Black Freighter," and the brief but intoxicating "Of Angels and Angles," a solo Meloy ballad celebrating the holy trinity of nautical lore: love, drowning, and death. ~ James Christopher Monger, All Music Guide