"Picaresque," the Decemberists' latest release, is reminiscent of a Tom Waits record. Not only is it chock-full of the same sort of downtrodden, doomed tramps that have populated the songwriter's catalogue for the last thirty years, but it is an album - in the tradition of, say, "Frank's Wild Years" (1987) or the recently released "Alice" (2002) - that is best suited for the stage. I would even argue that keyboardist Jenny Conlee, in her theatrical depiction of "Eli, The Barrow Boy" on the album cover, closely resembles the king of crust himself.
Of course, aside from the cabaret-styled organ on "The Mariner's Revenge," "Picaresque" sounds less threepenny than full-fledged opera, trading in Waits' jaunty melodies and booze-soaked slang for a bevy of handsomely decorated orchestral backdrops and frontman/songwriter Colin Meloy's fancy five-dollar words.
Nowhere is this more evident than on the album's majestic introduction. Trampling the first few seconds of recorded silence, "Picaresque" begins with a herd of portentous drum rolls before transforming into a collection of triumphant horns. The opulence of the instrumentation is matched only by Meloy's sumptuous lyrical descriptions: "And above all this falderol/On a bed made of chaparral/She is laid, a coronal placed on her brow."
But, if the soundscapes of "Picaresque" are occasionally pumped with the kind of pomp that one might expect from a military funeral, this effect is routinely undermined by the band's distinctly tongue-in-cheek approach.
"The Sporting Life," which would have been the perfect complement to Seth Cohen's recent mall roller-hockey crash on "The OC," features a bouncy Motown-inspired sound that doesn't exactly jive with its over-the-top narrative about an inept athlete's spill on the playing field. But for sheer absurdity, nothing beats the preened-to-perfection orchestral pop score of "The Bagman's Gambit" as it traces the "top-secret" adventures of a half-bored, half-delusional bureaucrat and his Soviet spy lover.
It is particularly curious how the supposed love songs of "Picaresque" are actually nothing of the sort, while more sordid tales of ghosts and prostitutes servicing "old men with limp dicks" (see "On the Bus Mall") are the most romantic efforts on the album.
Take the violin-led melody, "We Both Go Down Together," which would be a supremely romantic ode to two star-crossed lovers if it weren't for the fact that Meloy's Romeo rapes his Juliet and then proceeds to convince her to join him in a suicide pact (to cover up the crime, perhaps?). And he's pretty damn convincing, as his enchanting last words ("We fall but our souls are flying!") seem to be exactly the kind of padded poetry that his Juliet might fall for.
On the peripatetic tale of "Eli, The Barrow Boy," the horned halo and the strings have been cast aside for a sparer setup - fit for a peasant rather than royalty. Meloy's ability to find beauty in unexpected places is prominently on display here. By the track's end, Eli is dead - or rather, in purgatory spooking the trail that he traced in life. Still, it's undeniably sweet the way, even in death, he continues his quest to buy his love the "fine gown" she deserves.
"On the Bus Mall," a long, loving look at a pair of shunned ne'er-do-wells who find comfort in one another, may very well be the best song that Meloy has written thus far. It is also one of the few tracks on the album that doesn't feel like a well-executed joke. For whatever reason, the songwriter seems to have a great deal invested in it. In fact, if you can put out of your mind the track's silly, interpretive artwork in the CD booklet, you might actually catch a glimpse of Meloy without the pose. Indeed, a look past the pretensions and pranks of "Picaresque" reveals a richly layered musical experience.
