Send "The Decemberists " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Colin Meloy can read. This fact should surprise no one who has heard the Decemberists, or who has only so much as read one of their press clippings, nearly all of which seem bound, as if by secret contract, to make mention of the music as "literate." It's shorthand, of course, for Meloy's tendency towards narrative and metaphor and occasionally inscrutable vocabulary-- a way for writers to telegraph his interest in words without indulging in much of the same.The matter of the L-word has been the primary talking point about the band since Portland's HUSH records released their first EP nearly a decade ago, joined in 2006 by their signing to Capitol, and earlier this year by the somewhat surprising debut of their sixth album at number one on the Billboard charts. Somewhere in there, too, is nearly always talk of Meloy's glasses (well, he wears them) and a mention of the band's fans, usually classified as gawking drama-club nerds (which are indeed there, though for a while now the crowds at their live shows have been comprised less of folks in "three-button vests" and more in just plain t-shirts, usually also in pants). To echo an old trope (one that sounds, by coincidence, like the premise of a Decemberists song), the cobbler's children have no shoes: The band that's done more than almost any other in recent years for the art of narrative songcraft can't seem to get a decent story told about its own damn self. But the release of Long Live the King, the follow-up EP to the chart-topping The King Is Dead, offers as good a chance as we may get for a while to pause and take stock of what we might have been missing. The six songs comprise a few nearly-fleshed-out tracks and one demo rescued from the cutting-room floor (plus a previously-released cover of the Grateful Dead's "Row Jimmy", which the band sounds like they had a good time recording, making it at least a slight improvement over any of the seven hundred thousand versions of the Dead's original). It's not a cohesive artistic effort so much as a jumble of remainders-- unhemmed, lots of loose strings. Still, like rifling through a quilter's scrap bag, it's easy to see what bits were trimmed off from where, and worth it to see how they now might be put to their own uses....full text |
| Onethirtybpm |
| The Decemberists’ history with covering Grateful Dead’s “Jimmy Row” dates back quite a while now, but the band is finally ready to issue their version — along with five other tracks — as part of an official release. The Long Live the King EP will be released on November 1 and features predominantly acoustic songs recorded around the same time as this year’s The King is Dead full-length....full text |
| Altpress |
| The track list for Long Live The King, the latest EP from hyper-literate indie-folk vets the Decemberists, calls to mind the band’s last series of short-form studio releases—2008’s vinyl- and download-only Always The Bridesmaid singles series, a batch of principally traditional Decemberistian pop tunes cut during the sessions for 2009’s The Hazards Of Love but deemed useless to that record’s tightly woven program of vignettes about forest monsters and murderous rakes. Both projects find five stray originals augmented by an unlikely cover—there, a haphazard Velvet Underground tune featuring a rare lead vocal from keyboardist Jenny Conlee; here, a slice of vintage Grateful Dead (“Row Jimmy”) in which recovering Dead-hater Colin Meloy supplies his now-unmistakable tics to his Dead-loving band mates’ impressively faithful replication of Garcia & Co.’s original, from 1973’s Wake Of The Flood. As the title suggests, Long Live The King comes as a companion piece to January’s The King Is Dead, which had as little use for these bits of studio shrapnel as Hazards had for the Bridesmaid tracks. Regrettably, there’s nothing here as instantly gripping as “Valerie Plame” or “Raincoat Song,” songs legitimately conceived in a different artistic (and narrative) register than the album their sessions ultimately produced, and cleverly released in a classicist A-side/B-side format that befit their general accessibility. Long Live The King, by comparison, sounds distinctly like a cutting-room-floor exercise—a collection of outtakes left behind not in the name of aesthetic cohesion, but simply because the group had better songs more deserving of release. The King is Dead, as the first Decemberists album to top the Billboard charts, clearly proved its appeal beyond the band’s niche audience of good-natured college kids who find pop music a more enjoyable vocabulary builder than musty old books. The companion volume, however, is a pretty blatant for-fans-only affair—a pleasant helping of Decemberists-by-numbers for the more-is-more contingent, but nothing a more general audience can’t find done better elsewhere. Admittedly, this saddles the EP with an unearned air of mediocrity. Colin Meloy, after 10 years, remains among the most accomplished songwriters of his generation, and despite their formal simplicity, the best The King Is Dead tracks have weathered their near-year of life with class, while the worst ones have unveiled hidden hooks and pleasures not readily apparent on inaugural listens. Songs such as “E. Watson” and “Burying Davy,” though ultimately retreads of ground this band have covered dozens of times prior, are rooted in that same sensibility—they’re just anchored by a dirge-like slog that gives the likes of “Rox In The Box” and “June Hymn” the edge. Of further interest is “I 4 U & U 4 ME,” an endearingly loose home demo that recalls the early B-side “Sunshine” (released on 2004’s “Billy Liar” single), only grounded in a melodic maturity elusive to the earlier track. Particularly as it gives way to the collection’s two final and weakest cuts (“Row Jimmy” and the falsetto-cluttered misstep “Sonnet”), its off-the-cuff levity is a boon the EP’s front-to-back playability....full text |
The Decemberists lyrics
