Her Majesty the Decemberists is their second full-length release, following the critically praised Castaways and Cutouts, originally released in 2001. Together, in a nutshell, you have the Decemberists: erudite populists, knotty folksingers, innovative traditionalists through and through. The best music has always pollinated this way, and the Decemberists are wise to aid along this ritual. You learn the words, you sing the songs, they get stuck in your head, you sing them for others. (Who are Billy Liar and Myla Goldberg (as songs are named after both)? And if insight into them makes the songs more meaningful, what other allusions are hidden elsewhere?)Īt the same time, the lyric sheet represents a simple desire to turn their music into something sing-able - mimicking the folk convention of passing songs along orally before they were ever written down. At once, they’re showing their cards (no mysterious phrases, no possessive secrecy) and unearthing a whole other world of imagination and curiosity. Giving you their lyrics so plainly is both an offering and an instruction. More than that, they are involved narratives, which paint historical scenes in faraway places, pluck literary references from dusty volumes and use multisyllabic words you may need a dictionary to define. The Decemberists’ songs - on this release, sporting titles like “Shanty for the Arethusa” and “The Chimbley Sweep”, are stories. And second, they hope you’ll eventually sing along.Īllow me to further interpret these seemingly petty details. First, they want you to read their lyrics. So by finding the words inside, all neatly typed in a classic font, you know a couple of things right off about this band. Though lyric sheets are not unheard of entities in contemporary releases, they are a rare find, overlooked in favor of arty photography/graphic design or more often nothing (fewer pages to print = less cost). An important detail about Her Majesty the Decemberists - and one I’m venturing you won’t read about in many other reviews of the album - is that there’s a lyric sheet inside.
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