[music] THE DECEMBERISTS - Picaresque (KRS)

The Decemberists: music's answer to Dickens (but without the ponderousness), Gorey (without the absurdity) and Lemony Snicket (without the smarm). They just really like writing songs about chimney sweeps, the ghosts of infants, and barrowboys. Maybe I should admit that I don't know what a barrowboy is, though I do like the song about one on Picaresque. I'm just pretty sure we don't have them anymore.

Starting with last year's EP (their fourth release), I've told people how GREAT it is that the Decemberists have avoided getting terrible, then silently kicked myself for accepting such low expectations.

But see, they haven't done anything to set low expectations, so I won't accuse them of trying to sandbag me. All they did was get famous (well, indie-famous) with some high-concept music. It's not their fault-- nor, as it turns out, their fate-- that many high-concept bands who break out get lost in a swamp of (a) not trying very hard and (b) discovering that 'maturing' your highly-stylized sound has turned you into Elvis Costello.

So anyway...

For the first time I feel like the band's songs could definitely stand on their own as 'compositions'. That's not to say I'm dying to hear solo versions; the instruments still hold most of the weight, and it strains the unusual charms of Colin Meloy's voice to isolate it too much. But in the past, when the shtick began to grate on me, the whole record fell to pieces. Picaresque, I find that I can approach with a patience born of finally giving a shit what a second-rate Decemberists song is like.

Back to the pitfalls of fame, though; the Decemberists sound like, far from hitting the traps I mentioned above, they try very hard but don't realize amid it all that they're a good band, and without that realization, their style (for better or worse) will evolve very, very slowly. One track ("The Mariner's Revenge Song") makes teensy motions toward the grand scale they toyed with in the 18-minute "The Tain", but mostly "Revenge" racks up an epic-looking running time just by piling on a bunch of additional verses. I can appreciate a song that doesn't bore me despite having eight stanzas. But eventually, the fact that part of the Decemberists' stance is pretending that everything they do's been done before will stop being cute and start being true.

[finder] soup

Someone I know pointed out that if you search for [ btvs tv ] on Google, in the search results "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" is bolded, as though that was literally what you searched for. If you search for [ btvs ] your hits all have to do with Buffy, but the full name of the show isn't in bold.

This also works with [ lotr movie ], [ tmbg band ] and [ sttng tv ]. Some other trigger words exist too; [ lotr lord ] works, though it's hard to see why someone would search for that. Failed attempts: [ kotor game ], [ tanstaafl lunch ], [ athf cartoon ] and [ sgctc cartoon ]. God help me, I cannot think of any common acronyms to check which aren't at least somewhat geek-related.

I wonder if they plan to eventually have the search engine make guesses about acronyms. The feature doesn't seem quite useful enough to bother with if a human has to tell it what things mean.