The Decemberist

Neutral Milk Hotel.

In almost all the reviews on The Decemberist’s albums, critics have unanimously compared them to that of indie music legends, Neutral Milk Hotel. It’s just a matter of counting the words, and then anticipating how many words the critic could write before dropping the reference. This review is no exception, and it goes one better, by putting NMH’s name from the beginning of the article.

It is not surprising that The Decemberist has been compared to Neutral Milk Hotel. Besides the obvious love of blaring horn instruments, the suspicious influence of European folk music, and the bizarre and dreamlike album covers, one need not listen too far into The Decemberist to realize the most striking similarity between Colin Meloy and Jeff Magnum is the surrealistic style of story-telling with their music. The almost sub-conscious stream-like lyrics of both men, evocative of that dream you had last night. Not nightmarish, but a story-telling that is so illogical that it can only happen in dreams. For example, Jeff Magnum talks about “the only girl I only loved was born with roses in her eyes, where they killed and buried her alive one night in Holland 1945”, while Colin Meroy speaks of “My name is Leslie Anne Levine” who “still clung onto the petticoats of the girl who died with me”.

However, it would be unfair to The Decemberist if one were to say that they are similar to NMH. While Jeff Magnum pushed his music to the brink a surrealistic dreamscape, Colin Meroy still maintains a sense of human emotions in his writings. To draw an appropriate analogy, while NMH’s song might be dreams that makes you wonder “what-the-fuck-was-that” when you wake up, there are songs in The Decemberist which would make you feel a tinge of melancholy when you lay awake in bed.

I’ve recently purchased all three albums (ouch, a hole in the pocket) released by The Decemberist for the past three years. Which one of them do I recommend? All of them. Asking me to choose between them would be like asking me to choose between whether NMH was better or NMH was better. Now that’s a no-brainer.