A Long and Verdant December

Storytelling is seldom so piquant. Music is seldom filled with such ambrosial emotion. So deliciously descriptive. So utterly immersing. The Hazards of Love is the Decemberists at their ineffable best.

Since their full-length debut, 2002’s Castaway and Cutouts, the band has been creating battlegrounds for narrative and melody. With The Hazards of Love the band’s quills, dipped in imaginative myth and lyrical poetry, confront a slashing, energetic, vibrant gallimuafry of instruments that results in a fairytale opera where our senses meet our emotions.

This is a rock opera in the true sense. Not simply a concept album of which bands like The Fiery Furnaces, The Mars Volta or Radiohead are so fond. It is not a musical narrative like Pink Floyd’s The Wall or The Who’s Quadrophenia or even Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and Zappa’s Joe’s Garage Acts I, II, and III. The Hazards of Love does everything we expect an opera to: it combines libretto and a musical score, and it does it with passion and tenderness.

Our biggest obstacle here is, perhaps, overcoming the “opera” tag. On the one hand we have “opera”, which is sadly aligned with elitism and snobbery as it conjures images of grandiose theatre halls and large-scale productions with full orchestras, obese performers and outlandishly lavish accoutrements. This is the opera hall where clapping is indeed replaced with the jangling of jewellery. On the other hand we have “rock opera” and its garish images of big-haired guitar-driven, shirts-off bands of the seventies and eighties.

Thankfully The Hazards of Love is far removed from both these images. There is no pretension or elitist refinement, and no big arena pomposity. From the moment the Prelude begins we get dragged into its fairytale world of whimsy and illusion, to come out 17 tracks and an hour later emotionally drained, yet wonderfully fulfilled by the sultry choruses and elaborate plot details.

The libretto, like so much opera, is about desire, true love and loss. It is about wanting. Most importantly, it is about the fulfilment of these wants. A fulfilment that gives the want meaning – our heroine and hero’s love is true because it is realised.

 The story tells the tale of Margaret (voiced by Lavender Diamond’s Becky Stark), a woman from a city near the forest, and her lover William (voiced by the band’s Colin Meloy), a shape-shifting forest dweller whom we meet in the shape of a “white and wounded fawn”.

Our lovers are separated by jealousy and hatred in the guise of the Forest Queen (My Brightest Diamonds’ Shara Worden) who has tabs on William’s life and a murdering rake who abducts Margaret. The lovers’ wants drive them to reunite, regardless of the cost. Worden’s contribution here is significant she wails and snarls with the gusto of PJ Harvey and the rawness of Kate Bush.

The characters are not overly deep, yet they needn’t be. It is not their personality that drives the album’s plot, but rather the emotional depth of the situation in which they find themselves. Yet, there is enough description for us to become emotionally attached to the characters. The rake’s personality, for example, is wonderfully expressed through his personal story told by himself with great bitterness in The Rake’s Song. Here, for example, he talks of killing his children:

Charlotte I buried after feeding her foxglove
Dawn was easy, she was drowned in the bath
Isaiah fought but was easily bested
Burned his body for incurring my wrath
Alright, alright, alright

This is storytelling from bygone years – a nod to 16th century drama and 18th and 19th century poetry, as well as to medieval tales of adventure, as well as fairytales. It is a tale that brings together Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Midsummer Night’s Eve, The Lady of Shallot, Christobel and Snow white, while even incorporating elements of Greek and Roman classics.

Yet, it is in its essence a simple love tale. The simplicity can be made as complex as the listener wishes. There is mythological allusion and we are placed into a world that is clearly an acknowledgement of the sublime and an aligning with the philosophies of the nature poets, full with the personifications of nature found in William Wordsworth’s Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Nature is a mother and her wonder, her nurturing kindness, can be seen all around us.

This connection to nature is a powerful theme realised in almost every song, though, perhaps most beautifully so in The Hazards of Love 2 and Isn’t it a Lovely Night:

“I’ll lay you down on clover beds
The stars, a roof above our heads
And we’ll lie till the corn crake crows
And reft the weight of our summer clothes”

“Isn’t it a lovely night?
And so alive with fireflies
Providing us their holy light
And here we made a bed with boughs
And thistles-downs that we had found
To lay upon the dewy ground…

Wasn’t it a lovely breeze,
The swept the leaves of arbores?
And bent to brush our blushing knees.”

And on Won’t Want For Love (Margaret In the Taiga)

“Mistle Thrush, Mistle Thrush,
Lay me down in the underbrush
My naked feet grow weary with the dusk
Willow boughs, willow boughs,
Make a bed to lay me down
Let your branches bow to cradle us.”

The musical journey is as descriptive as the accompanying lyrical poetry.

The leitmotif is driven as much by the libretto as by the score. Each character is easily identified by their sound – the predictable associations that work so well in opera – the heavy “da-da-doom” of the evil queen, to the light, spirit-like wail of instrumentation of Margaret. In between we have an astonishing array of styles and flavours from Irish jig, folk, klezmer, thrashing guitars, sea chantey, and prog rock, to simple pop. And unlike most albums that attempt this unification of nations, flavours, styles and instrumentation, The Hazards of Love never loses its audience in a mesh of variety. The music is never self-indulgent in its experimentation and always remains true to its purpose… as a partner to the libretto.

The album, however, is not perfect and, as has become synonymous with the rock opera, it briefly gets lost in a silly moment of rock opera cliché with the introduction of a children’s choir on The Hazards of Love 3. It is a moment that passes quickly and one which doesn’t damage the overall strength of the album.

The Hazards of Love is The Decembrists’ fifth full studio album and their first in three years. Despite three eclectic EPs, it is a welcome return for fans who were wondering what Meloy would tackle after his somewhat grandiose musical representation of a Japanese folk tale in The Crane’s Wife.

Fans will be pleased, it will be as expected, though newcomers to the Decemberists should be warned: The Hazards of Love expects a lot from listeners. This is not simply an album of songs, and while there are moments of pretty melody and simplicity, such as on Isn’t It a Lovely Night? and Annan Water, and even some straight-up rock songs that could even be considered singles, such as The Rake’s Song, it is a work of art that needs to be appreciated in its entirety. To get the most from it you have to give your all to it. You need to give it as much attention as you would to your lover, or a good book and if you do, it will reward you like a lover or a good book.

The greatest reward comes with the album’s denouement, The Hazards of Love 4 as want transmogrifies into peace. It is a peace that stems the flow of tears created by the constant longing, as we admire the purity of our hero and heroine’s love. Their acceptance of death for their moment of love has given their want meaning and with the album’s dying sounds they unite.

“With this long last rush of air,
we speak our vows and sorry whispers,
when the waves came crashing down,
he closed his eyes and softly kissed her.”

They are no more troubled by the hazards of love and we, for an hour at least, are not troubled by the hazards of ours.