Tim Dunlop came to blogging fame with The Road to Surfdom. He was then snaffled by News Limited where he ran Blogocracy. In 2008, he declared a retirement of sorts, but he’s back in the saddle for Crikey with our first music blog:Johnny’s in the Basement.
Here’s his first music review.
Review
The Hazards of Love
The Decemberists
(Capitol)
As this is the first CD review for the new blog, I’ve chosen something that I am absolutely gooey in the fork about. I love this album. Seriously love it. Which is odd in that I’ve never listened to the band before and only happened upon it after catching a bit of clip of them on The Colbert Report. But I love this album. Let me count the ways.
First up, it’s a concept album. A concept album! It has a concept—a story—connecting all the songs, and it goes on for a whole album. Concept. Album. Yay. Is there anything daggier, this side of Kevin Rudd in shorts? Daggy in the sense that it doesn’t lend itself easily to the single-song download mentality of iTunes commodification.
The album is a throwback.
The lyrics tell a story and the music repeats and develops themes and riffs as it goes along. You really do have to listen to it as a whole. Which is not to say that there aren’t stand-alone songs that reward in their own right—as the clip below will testify—but at the end of the day, the individual songs are not the point. It’s really one big song, and to download a single track in isolation would be like falling in love with someone then cutting off their arm and taking that home to meet your parents and expecting them to understand why you love the person. Concept. Album. Trust me.
And what is the concept, I don’t hear you ask? Oh, just the usual medieval tale of debauchery and infanticide that you might expect from a bunch of guys obviously obsessed with English folk music and the bucolic fantasies that tend to drive one wing of that genre. I’m only guessing, but I reckon Dungeons and Dragons might be broken out during breaks in rehearsals, and if Colin Meloy, who sings, plays guitar and wrote nearly all the songs, hasn’t got the extended DVD versions of the Lord of the Rings movie on a shelf somewhere, I’ll eat one of my three copies of the book…
Read the whole review at Johnny’s in the Basement: Music for grown-ups who remember when they weren’t
Hey Tim,
Nice first effort and you have encouraged me to have a listen (to the entire album – not just the songs you mention!). Your point about the commoditisation of music in the iTunes generation is one worthy of bit of robust debate.
I agree with you that true music fans are trying to recreate the highs they got when they first started discovering the breadth and depth of music out there. The joy when you discover something new and involving is rare but beautiful.
That said, the music business has long propagated the myth of the album for purely commercial reasons. The harsh reality is that most albums by most artists contain only a few songs that will compel repeated listening. The freedom given by iTunes is that ability to explore lots of music and to pick and choose individual tracks that you are attracted to. In the last few years I have overwhelming bought most of my music at iTunes. A lot of that music was purchased as individual tracks. Promoting a disc as a “concept album” is one way record labels have sought to maintain the status of albums with the buying public. At the end of the day, good music will out – whether as a single track or as part of a joyous long player!
Paul