A newsletter for the students, faculty and staff of the Collin County Community College District. Published monthly. For information or submissions, call 972.599.3142. Cougar News welcomes student and faculty submissions. Next deadline: Oct. 10 All submissions are due by 5 p.m. on the due date. Photos cannot be returned. Text should be emailed to mrobinson@ccccd.edu or sent on disk. Please submit copy that is proofed, edited and saved in Word format. Cougar News staff: Lisa Vasquez, director; Mark Robinson, editor; Marcy Cadena-Smith, contributor; Sydney Portilla-Diggs, campus correspondent; Stephanie Hall, student correspondent; Tatiana Shehadeh, special contributor; Nick Young, photography and layout
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Music Review -- The Decemberists
By Mark Robinson
Cougar News Editor
Always the academics of modern indie music, The Decemberists maintain their literary-laced repertoire with their newest release, “The Crane Wife.”
Why this is any more different from their previous three albums is that this is the band’s major-label debut, a distinction that forces lesser bands to the middle. The move, however, has pushed The Decemberists in a progressively accessible plain. It’s thought-provoking concepts without the headache. It’s a momentously beautiful album. It is obvious that hours of work went into everything from the songwriting, song choice, arrangements and the ordering of the tracks on the disc.
Songs meld into one another, “The Crane Wife 3” and “Sons and Daughters” make appropriate bookends. The former pursuing the onset of grief and death that exemplifies the current of the entire album; the latter, however, providing the light at the end of the tunnel, as the bombs “they fade away.”
Somewhat of a disconnected concept album, most songs parallel the overriding Japanese folk tale of the crane wife. Subscribing to the theme of love, betrayal, love lost and death, the meat of the album twirls a dark yarn of murder and other unsavory acts spanning time, place and dimension -- “Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)” takes place during the American Civil War while “O Valencia!” is set in the 20th century.
Colin Meloy’s everyman’s warble waxes poetic over a masterful narrative.
“And the war came with a curse and a caterwaul/And the war came with all the poise of a cannonball/And they’re picking out our eyes by coal and candlelight/When the war came, the war came hard,” he posits on “When the War Came.”
Musically, “The Crane Wife” proves to be in the vein of everything from REM, Bob Dylan and Cat Stevens except so much more dynamic and complex. Probably one of the more technical albums released this year especially for a group of songs anchored with acoustic guitar. The Decemberists are well read for a bunch of “wan vagabonds,” exhibiting a quaintness of a Wes Anderson film with an appreciation for the deeper part of the ocean.
According to French novelist Emile Zola, “Love and death, possessing and killing, are the dark foundations of the human soul.” Meloy and Co. evoke this very sentiment and the humanness of “The Crane Wife” is exactly what makes it so appealing.
Four out of Five Paws
[PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION]
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