Peter Viney's Blog

The Decemberists
02 Academy Bristol
8 March 2011

Set list:
July July
Calamity Song
Rox In The Box
Rise To Me
We Both Go Down Together
The Sporting Life
Grace Cathedral Hill
Won’t Want For Love (Margaret in the Taiga)
The Crane Wife 3
The Rake’s Song
Don’t Carry It All
Down By The Water
This Is Why We Fight
16 Military Wives
The Chimbley Sweep / “Blues”

First encore
Red Right Ankle
The Mariner’s Revenge Song

Second encore
June Hymn

I used to scribble down setlists, but have avoided it since being near-assualted by an aggressive Van Morrison female fan / acquaintance (“I was backstage before the show” she told me) who saw me taking notes and asked if I was writing a f*cking review, because Van hates f*cking reviewers and I’ll f*cking nut any f*cking reviewers. Nice girl. It’s so much easier to take setlists off the net the next day. Then you tend to look at the previous three nights. Fascinating. It’s a very “unfixed” set list for The Decemberists. The songs from the new album The King Is Dead got aired at Bristol except one of the ones I most wanted to hear, January Hymn, which only appeared in Glasgow, and All Arise which appeared at Birmingham and Dublin. (If I hadn’t seen the set list, I would have said All Arise was played at Bristol, with the pedal steel, but this must be false memory!). The rest was pretty moveable, though the big set pieces, 16 Military Wives, and The Mariner’s Revenge Song appeared every time and June Hymn always closed the show. Even The Crane Wife 3 and The Rake’s Song only made three out of four shows, though luckily we got both at Bristol.

Chronologically then. The support band were Blind Pilot, like The Decemberists, from Oregon. They had an unusual line up: guitar / vocal, acoustic bass, drums, vibraphone, trumpet doubling on accordion, and banjo doubling on dulcimer. Like The Decemberists basic line-up, they featured one woman, the banjo player. I knew they were officially a two-piece with four extra musicians. I hadn’t realised the two piece were the lead singer and the drummer … I’d assumed the banjo player who did most back-up vocals was the other half. Like The Decemberists, they featured joining in to drum on a bass tom-tom. Like the Decemberists, they featured intelligent lyrics, and based everything round one vocalists. They were a lot like The Decemberists all the way round. Extremely good too. I immediately bought their CD in the interval.

To sum up The Decemberists, in the words of the guy behind me (who said it about fifty times): fucking outstanding. I thought of typing it fifty times, but I badly cut my typing finger on the razor sharp door handle of a typically filthy Bristol taxi (both the ones we used were filthy anyway) so I won’t.

I wanted an image of Colin Meloy for this piece. I Googled. Either he has a lot of near identical brown plaid shirts or he’s got two years’ use out of just the one on stage. He has a comfortable charisma, a stunning voice, and relaxed, natural audience rapport. Meloy has done solo tours. I was extremely surprised how little the rest of the band sang. They have to import a “Sixth Decemberist” on tour to replace their female guests from the albums, this time Sara Watkins (from Nickel Creek) on backing vocals, fiddle and guitar.  If you take Robbie Robertson’s 1970 quote about The Band, that they were five equals with four singers, while Creedence Clearwater Revival were instead “John Fogerty and some guys,” there is an element of that about The Decemberists. Ray Davies and The Kinks or Raoul Malo with The Mavericks is another comparison. You have one guy writing the stuff and the same guy singing lead and doing the introductions. But Meloy has wisely avoided the solo ego bit (it really doesn’t look his kind of thing) ; wisely because The Decemberists play with such mutual empathy, and are obviously (judging by the setlists) totally able to follow whatever mood the show takes.

I came to The Decemberists at The Crane Wife then worked back. I thought The Hazards of Love brilliant, but something that had to be consumed in one go, and which I thought was quite deliberately “difficult.” The radio-friendly The King Is Dead apparently annoyed some purists, but to me it’s far and away their best album. When I saw the folkie Fairport Convention, I thought “folk-oriented bands just don’t have drummers this good!” That was Dave Mattacks. The same thought struck me about John Moen. What a drummer!

How do you pick outstanding tracks when, in our friend’s words, it was all fucking outstanding. The Rake’s Song with everyone beating bass tom-toms? This Is Why We Fight with its unintended topical references to current events in Libya?

When we die
We will die
With our arms unbound
And this is why
This is why
Why we fight
Come hell

Perhaps Colin Meloy working the audience up for “being eaten by a whale” noises before The Mariner’s Revenge Song. Or June Hymn? A sublime piece where the singer is even better than the record? Not much question really: The Rake’s Song and June Hymn.

Criticisms? The long comedy pieces establish rapport, but shave off three minutes (easy) and we could have had January Hymn as well as John Moen’s  piss-take on the blues.

The sound was excellent, but not impeccable. The O2 Academy doesn’t look the sort of venue where the acoustic is ever brilliant. I noticed the care that had gone into the small Fender amplifiers mic’ed into the PA, and what looked like an authentic Orange valve amp … there was a second Orange amp, but it looked later. Also the racks of guitars on both sides of the stage. These guys really care about their sound. My fucking outstanding guy complained early that it’s not very loud for rock and roll. I thought they hit perfect volume for the room, loud enough to be exciting when they rocked and audible when they were subtle. But to be curmudgeonly, I would have brought up Sara Watkins’ microphone about 20% in the mix, and lifted the keyboards a tad. They had undistorted bass (hard in bad halls). I know it’s rock and roll to have everyone crammed together standing, and it’s great to see a band at their peak  … The King is Dead went straight to #1 on the Billboard 200 in the USA … for a mere £15 too (compare the aged Ringo Starr going out with guys who haven’t had an American hit since the seventies, and who’ve never had a British hit, at FOUR times the price this year. And Ringo still can’t sing in tune.) But I’d love to see The Decemberists in a proper concert hall with decent natural acoustics, and I’d love to be sitting down too with decent eyelines. I’m sure that the right room would reveal their balance to be into the Leonard Cohen / Paul Simon range of perfection.