‘The Hazards of Love’ may not have the instantly gratifying hooks the band is capable of, but as a complete listening experience it’s an impressive and satisfying work that gleefully defies convention.

I’m halfway through my first headphone spin of The Decemberists’ new album, The Hazards of Love, on the afternoon my pre-order finally shows up. Suddenly, I realize I have no idea which track I’m listening to, or how many have passed since I began; for the most part, there’s almost no telling where one stops or the next one starts. Endings flow into beginnings, musical elements are repeated and reworked like Oregonian leitmotifs, and since I was only listening in the background while on the computer, the tracks had washed over me like Portland rainclouds.

The concept of the album was no surprise, as I’d heard it was a continuous story. Green Day’s American Idiot was dubbed a concept album too though, and that spawned several distinct three-and-a-half minute singles. Hazards of Love takes its concept much more earnestly: it isn’t far from being one epic, hour-long musical drama. When you pop in this album you’re committing to something big, to the point where it’s less enjoyable if you don’t have time to sit through the whole story.

It takes stones to make an album like this. Faced with the iPod-ification of the music industry, leading to massive single-only digital sales and a rampant piracy problem that’s decimated the number of physical albums sold, this band made an album devoid of the pop conventions that would make it easy to break up in bits and pieces. All the evidence suggests that now is not the time for a project like this, but they did it anyway.

The move is even more surprising since this is their second release for major label Capitol records, with whom they had some success on their previous entry, The Crane Wife. That album lead to arena-sized, symphony-supported shows and even a mock feud with Stephen Colbert. Their corporate partners could have pressured them into releasing something even more pop-ified and listener-friendly. Instead, they follow up with a mythical tale of bestial love affairs, child-murdering rapists, and a control-freak forest queen who would rather see a pregnant woman killed than share her son’s affection. Not exactly focus-group friendly. If this idea ever was work-shopped in the boardroom, the notes would be priceless — “Let’s make the Rake character dangerous… but warm. And edgy-cute.”

Yet somehow that didn’t happen. Without a widely-played single to speak of, The Decemberists managed to debut at #14 on the Billboard top 40, before physical CDs were even available in stores and besting all their previous albums (The Crane Wife peaked at #38).

This is partly due to the fact that, for those willing to embrace the album as a whole, it’s a gorgeous piece of work. The band’s tendency for grand multi-instrument arrangements is at its most sweeping and dynamic, traversing heavy metal peaks and soft acoustic valleys with equal skill. Once properly digested, it’s high drama with a wrenching soundtrack. Each sequence — it’s almost wrong to call them individual songs — matches perfectly with the scene it’s trying to set. Guest female vocalists from Lavender Diamond and My Brightest Diamond assume the roles of young Margaret and the Queen, one’s innocent lilt and the other’s sultry power making it seem as if they were cast to parts, not just recorded as guest artists. It may not have the instantly gratifying hooks the band is capable of, but as a complete listening experience it’s an impressive and satisfying work, which feels as if it’s taken you on an emotional journey beginning to end.

But their success may be more attributable to how they’ve evolved as a band — not in terms of sound, but in terms of following. Only bands like The Decemberists can get away with a concept album like this. By growing organically over their nearly 10-year run, not grabbing at a rapid rise to fame, the fans that do stick with them are the kind of fans that have the patience for experiments. They’re more invested in the artists’ ideas, not just a single hit that happened to catch their ear. That makes them willing to engage with an entire work, to dig into its concepts — as well as its liner notes, which helps — and uncover its merits. To those kind of fans, this isn’t the pretentious vanity project some critics may see it as, because they know no one is pretending here. Meloy and crew are just doing what they love, what they’ve always done: epic literary prog-folk rock. And that’s just fine with their audience.

Luckily, that audience just happens to be big enough to support the whole enterprise. Similar to another crew with a concept album this month, Mastodon, they’ve got a wide enough fan base to be successful, but not so big that outsiders are trying to swoop in, take over, and ruin the fun. Bands like this exist just the right distance out on the fringes so they can do what they want and still find a big enough audience to make it work. It’s an ideal situation in any medium really, the same way Kevin Smith or Quentin Tarantino operate almost entirely to serve a certain just-big-enough set of geeks. Hell, basically the entire graphic novel (a.k.a. ‘comics for grown-ups’) industry operates on this premise.

It’s a great set-up. An artist can make something of beauty like The Hazards of Love and accept that maybe this isn’t the one that’ll win them a slew of new fans. And just being able to accept that means they’ve already won. The band gets to make the album they want to make, and the people who follow them get something that’s unapologetically true to that band’s ideals.

It’s a pretty punk/metal ethic. It’s no coincidence that metal is the genre traditionally known for its epic concept records. If writing whole albums based on medieval fables is metal, so is deciding you’re not trying to write songs that everyone likes, but just doing what you love. Look at a band like Coheed and Cambria, a prog-rock group whose entire output is based on one drawn-out storyline. Their music certainly isn’t for everyone, but at the very least you have to respect their commitment and ambition.

Because in the future it could very well be that bands like this with fans loyal enough to stand by them — and pay for their music — are the only ones left standing as the labels crumble and sales plummet. A landscape full of bands whose idea of ‘making it’ isn’t playing Madison Square Garden and selling $500 tickets, but just having enough supporters to keep doing their thing.

I’ve always hated reviews whose premises are simply, ‘If you like this band, you’ll like their new record too’, and gloss over the real merits of a release. It’s certainly true that I don’t think any of my friends, who simply don’t understand my crush on this band, will turn around and change their tune with The Hazards of Love. It’s still bookish, it’s still melodramatic, and if you don’t like Colin Meloy’s voice there’s just no helping you at this point. So to a certain extent, that statement is valid, as is the converse. But what’s more interesting is that there are obviously enough others out there like me who love bookish melodrama, and buy this geeky Portland band’s album as soon as it’s available. We may not be everywhere, but we are legion, and we’ll be just fine off on our own.

……….

a few footnotes:

For anyone who counts themself among the aforementioned legion, The Onion AV Club did an excellent and extensive interview with Colin Meloy leading up to the album’s release.

For evidence that some people get it, some people don’t, contrast the Pitchfork and Popmatters reviews of the album. Both make valid assessments, and yet one writer considers it a failure, the other a success. Sometimes the best art is the art that polarizes.