It has not, it's fair to say, been a great week. I woke up on Monday morning... well actually like most of the country I woke up on Monday morning with an egregious hangover after we won the World Cup. But I woke up on Tuesday morning with a pretty kick-ass plan in life. By Thursday afternoon all of that was, shall we say, "pear-shaped." In short, I've needed some playfulness this week, and this is just the album for it.
From the first almost aggressive drumbeat of the excellent opening track, 'The Infanta', this album is completely infectious. It's all organs and keys and piano accordians and thundering drums and epic shanties, and it is just superb. But while it's accessible and upbeat, it's certainly not all cutesy and carefree: it also carries a wonderfully dark edge, dealing lyrically with some occasionally downright despairing subjects (withness the haunting track 3, 'Eli, the Barrow Boy'). The complexity of this quite clever lyrical treatment blends beautifully with the interesting sea-shanty-esque vibe that The Decemberists do so well. The very good second track, 'We Both Go Down Together' is another great example of this juxtaposition, beautifully full of pulsing accordians, and with a major chorus to lift to the song, and 'Sixteen Military Wives', an old favourite of mine, is a riotously fun song about war casualties. As ya do.
A great album full of lyrically-clever, well-crafted songs, it also draws heavily on the accordian, which I love. Nearer the end, 'The Mariner's Revenge Song' does slip a little into the oom pah pah accordian that I so judged (and still do) Beirut's first album for, but in The Decemberists context this just sounds of sea-shanties and scalliwags. It makes me want rum.
And on that happy note, I'm off to the pub.
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