You Ain’t No Picasso has put together a collection of dozens of covers played by The Decemberists and their lead singer Colin Meloy. They take on Pink Floyd, The Velvet Underground, Cheap Trick, Kate Bush and lots, lots more.
The Decemberists
The Hazards of Love
March 24th
Capitol Records
I suppose it shouldn't be surprising that The Decemberists would try and create a rock opera at some point in their career. Their last album, The Crane Wife, was damn close to being one itself and their has always been a cinematic feel to the stories within Colin Meloy's songs. But with everything linked together on The Hazards of Love, the songs kind of seem a little too overpowering at times. They are extremely dense songs, once again showing off Meloy's penchant for wordiness, but occasionally cluttered musically. It's almost as if The Decemberists tried to do too much for their rock opera. Still, there are a lot of good moments on here just none of those catchy moments that originally hooked us on this band.
.jpg)
Portland indie darlings The Decemberists return this week with new album The Hazards of Love. You can always rely on Colin Meloy’s troupe to err towards the grandiose and the new record’s no different, if anything more preposterously overblown than ever before, its songs tied to a narrative involving illicit love, forest queens and murderous knaves. Courageous story-tellers in a time of meta-narratives, The Decemberists’ love of purple prose thrives in the spacious reaches of a rock-prog-blues that kind of sounds like The Who had they for a brief time become obsessed with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bombastic.
With its relics from bygone eras, low ceilings, archaic equipment and elderly, chain-smoking bar staff, you could be forgiven for thinking The Montague Arms was a backwards village pub in one the...
Photos from a recent FOE gig - a friend of our friends Hold Your Horse Is - she’s gonna be big!!! Read the gig review after the jump.
Shots of North Carolina’s folk-rocking Avett Brothers’ stop in Glasgow - 22.08.11
Read the review of the gig here.
Take a look at the acts and art on offer at this year’s Latitude Festival in Suffolk. Included are the likes of Fight Like Apes, Lykke Li, Sea of Bees and Seasick Steve. Photos from our own...
Good time with Bad Guys. Photos from the May 29th gig at the Old Blue Last. Read the review by the Bad Guy himself, Stuart London after the jump.
Artrocker.com exclusive: for fans of White Lies and Crocodiles we’ve got some fresh pictures from their UK show at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire earlier this month, courtesy of Alessandro...
Follow us on
twitter here