King
Decemberist Colin Meloy's love for the heydays of British folk-rock has always served as the foundation on which he builds his crafty, idiosyncratic chamber pop, but on
Hazards of Love he's taken that bedrock and built his own version of Stonehenge. A 17-song suite (think one continuous song with track ID's peppered throughout for sanity's sake) about a girl named Margaret, shapeshifters, forest queens, and fairytale treachery,
Hazards of Love is ambitious, pretentious, obtuse, often impenetrable, and altogether pretty great. Harking back to the late-'60s/early-'70s offerings from bands like
Pentangle,
Horslips,
ELP,
Steeleye Span, and the
Incredible String Band, it makes no apologies for its nerdy, prog rock musicality, and convoluted narrative.
Meloy, who often cites
Shirley Collins,
Nic Jones, and
Anne Briggs as influences --
Hazards is named after a
Briggs' EP which featured no such song -- must have had a vast hard rock/power metal collection to draw from as well, as one can glean melodic cues and structures from
Iron Maiden and
Rush as easily as they can
Fairport Convention and
Jethro Tull. On a record with no obvious single (the first instance of the title track comes the closest), it's the album as a whole that needs to engage, and for the most part, the
Decemberists have succeeded. The inclusion of guest vocalists
Becky Stark (
Lavender Diamond) and
Shara Worden (
My Brightest Diamond), who bring some Little Queen-era
Heart to the table, as well as bit parts from
Jim James (
My Morning Jacket),
Rebecca Gates (
Spinanes), and
Robyn Hitchcock help keep the focus off
Meloy's affected vocals, but it's the music that drives this beast into the forest. Producer
Tucker Martine has beefed up the band's sound even more than he did with
Christopher Walla on 2006's
Crane Wife, channeling more reverb into the acoustics and a whole lot more brimstone into the electrics, resulting in what is easily the band's best sounding record to date.
Hazards of Love won't convert anybody who already wrote the band off as overly precious bookworms with a
Morrissey/Victorian ghost story fetish, but fans who have dutifully followed the
Decemberists since their 2002 debut get to take home bragging rights this time around. ~ James Christopher Monger