e might not have been awarded the 2006 Nobel Prize in literature last Thursday, but no one in popular music can hold a quill to the verbosity of the lead singer of The Decemberists, Colin Meloy. As fans of the band know, Meloy's lyrics and themes have never pandered to major labels looking to discover the trendy, radio-friendliness of so-called indie-sounding rock à la Dashboard Confessional and those '80s synth rockers gone wrong, The Killers.
"The Crane Wife" (taken from a popular Japanese folktale), is the band's first album in their fancy new Capitol Records-sponsored threads, and it comfortably reassures the possibility of artistic integrity in the all-too-often compromising music "industry."
Sigh of relief.
The opener, "The Crane Wife 3," is the out-of-sequence final chapter to the first of two suites anchoring the disc. It plays like an overture; the guitar is strummed gently, almost reluctantly, and then it picks up the pace with percussion and piano before the crescendo crests with electric guitars in the final 30 seconds.
The first track's meandering feedback resurges directly into the 12-minute "The Island." The song starts with keyboard psychedelia right out of the '60s and '70s (think Hendrix alone in "Norwegian Wood"), and ends somewhere between "Sympathy for the Devil" Stones and baroque elegy.
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