The Decemberists - As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again (2024)

 

Folk Rock / Progressive Folk / Alt-Country

RIYL: The Mountain Goats, Death Cab for Cutie, The Shins

★★★

There was an extended period of time when I loved The Decemberists. It mostly coincided with my high school days and my initial exposure to indie music via gateway bands such as Death Cab for Cutie, The Shins and Neutral Milk Hotel, and The Decemberists sounded quite a bit like all of that. The Crane Wife was (and still is) my favorite album by them, mostly because of the way it fused plucky folk-rock with massive prog structures, and I would find myself hitting repeat on both of its ten-minute multipart epics just to hear that one bridge near the end that made me feel something in context of the larger piece, without which it could feel cheap.

There was also a period of time when I hated The Decemberists. Something about Colin Meloy's smug lyricism and pretentious feaux-man-of-the-earth storytelling started to grate on me, or maybe I was just rebelling against the teenage aspects of myself that came to mind whenever I tried to revisit to them. I couldn't really explain my sudden disdain for the band I used to love so much, to the point where one of my friends postulated that they had to have hit and killed my dog with their tour bus to deserve my vitriol (they did not).

I grew out of that, too, and then mostly forgot about The Decemberists. I checked in again due to the fanciful cover art of What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, and enjoyed a few tracks but none of them really had staying power. At some point after that I added Castaways and Cutouts, Her Majesty, Picaresque and the recently deluxe edition of The Crane Wife (with some surprisingly decent bonus tracks!) back to my digital music library and hummed along to the songs I used to know as I worked my office job, and they held up, for the most part. I didn't suddenly feel the urge to gush over them like I did so often in high school, but I had to admit to myself once again that The Decemberists were pretty good.

And now another new album, its lengthy title inextricably linked with the general fan consensus of it being a grand return to their glory days, graces us with its monstrous presence. And for the most part, it’s also decent, or at least it sounds like The Decemberists from their period which I remember fondly. The record was teased with the 20-minute finale "Joan in the Garden", which I do have to say is as impressive as any of the epics penned during their '00s heyday, but the full album's worth of other material leading up to it is just… there. Admittedly there are a nonzero number of solid melodies in the batch, but every song has almost exactly the same mid-tempo: it's one relatively slow, jaunty, culturally appropriating folk ballad after another, and on my first few listens they all blended together so much that I couldn't even pick out a single highlight from the bunch.

Some distinctions, such as James Mercer's backing vocals on "Burial Ground" and the tender acoustics framing “All I Want Is You”, started to materialize after about three slogs through, but at that point I just didn't care enough anymore to spend another seventy minutes with it. "Joan", the initial lure for those of us reaching for a true Decemberists comeback, seems tacked on as an afterthought due to its placement at the end, but its unique triumph ends up making the rest of the album feel like the afterthought instead. A true comeback would integrate that same energy and compositional prowess (not to mention variety) into the fabric of the whole record, so sadly As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again is not The One we've been waiting for: its title is either a false promise or a statement that still remains to be proven true.