Hazards of Love

How has it been this long? This album came out . . . in March. It's September. That's half a year. I got to the Crane Wife within three or four, I thought. It's funny how much you jump on things based on who you're around.
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Bad choice of words. But it's true. When I was hanging around a big indie-music buff, I was learning so much about music coming out now. Well, then. When I was dating a guy really into sixties and seventies stuff, I learned about that, and while I half-kept up with the Decemberists and Of Montreal, I haven't heard or looked up anything about the Arcade Fire, the Flaming Lips, Interpol, any of the bands I was learning about then.

Anyway, Hazards of Love. This is, if anything, perhaps the ultimate Colin Meloy. The man is meaner than Joss Whedon to his lovers, (I mean the lovers who exist in his songs, for all I know he as Miss Ellis, his ladyfriend/maybe wife? and illuminatrix, have a nice life.) and his music itself has gotten heavier and heavier with each album. Most of Five Songs and Castatways and Cutouts could have been written in the 19th century, and you wouldn't know the difference, except for some strange mid-20th-century references. Maybe The Tain really let him explore those metal bands he loved when he was a nerdy adolescent, blending it with his lovely folky lyrics and reedy, nostalgia-soaked-wearing-a-flat-cap-and-suspenders voice.

Anyway, the usual star-crossed lovers, set sometime between the middle ages and the early 20th century, magic ghosts, drownings. (Colin loves to drown his characters. There have been a few stabbings, a poisoning or two, some deaths in childbirth or exposures of infants, two who presumably expire in a pitched battle inside a whale, and at least one off-screen shooting ('July! July!'- the uncle, who "was a crooked French-Canadian who was gut-shot running gin". And yes, that's a more or less direct quote. I love this band. But mostly, drownings.)

But Margaret, our ingénue, sings to the throbbing bass and some kind of guitar on track four - her light melody floating over the beat as if she didn't know it was there. 'Won't want for Love' will probably be my most-sung song for the next bit. Lyrics here.

William (her shape-shifting boreal lover)and his mum, the Forest Queen have an awesome duet as well, where we get to hear William's theme for the first time (The Wanting comes in Waves), interspersed with the gorgeously theatric 'Repaid'. William, over a slowly, tortured harpsichord(?) just sounds Colin-y, slightly, well, not atonal, but . . . anyway, a near-arpeggio of repetition as the back-story comes out. Then the drums and wall of guitar comes up, and off he goes into the stratosphere, his longing almost a palpable instrument.

Then up comes a meedly guitar thing that reminds me of (darker, more metal) the helicopter-like sounds from the beginning of 'Damned for All Time', from Jesus Christ Superstar. And in a rôle evocative of some of the great Broadway villainesses (from Rock opera, anyway), the Forest Queen spits out her rebuke, loving each caustic syllable, rolling it around in her deep, luscious tones like Tim Curry's Frankenfurter (go watch it- I'll wait. It's probably been far too long since you've seen it, anyway. Probably mostly NSFW, depending on where you work. ;) ), just relishing every word, it's so much fun to sing. I'm vamping more to this bit of this song than David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and the Stones' Beggar's Banquet (which includes the incomparable for dirty, grinding dancing 'Stray Cat Blues'.) But seriously, I dare you to not want to sing along with her, every time she draws out that "And now . . . this is how I am Repaid!"

'The Rake's Song', on the other hand, seems like it might be the first laid-back thing to come along, a nice mellow(ish . . .) return from our Interlude. If you don't listen too close, it sounds somewhat upbeat, and the 'Alrights' almost fool you. (Until the freaky background-singing children come in like the chorus from some Dickens/Bosch mashup.) But this is Colin Meloy, so applying the tale of multiple, unrepentant infanticides into easily the most danceable track on the album shouldn't be too much a surprise. I mean, for heaven's sake. The lyrics are reminiscent of Voltaire's gleeful 'When You're Evil', though this is one time when someone beats Colin on theatricality. Go watch this one too. Well, listen.

And I won't tell the ending, but no doubt you've guessed. Anyway, if you like theatrical neo-folk bands, inching their way toward metal-influenced concept albums, give a listen. apparently, I love them.