Album review: Decemberists - What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World

Album review

If you’re the Decemberists, how do you set about winning over new fans in 2015? On the go for 15 years now, the Portland band (and they’re among the Portlandiest of Oregon groups) the five piece have just released their seventh album, ponderously titled What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World.

Having scaled the indie-rock heights on The Crane Wife in the mid-Noughties, Colin Meloy et al have been trying their hand at various haphazard genres since. There was the indulgent Hazards of Love, initially planned as one long, twisting song (yes, there are plenty of prog notes present), and then the medieval folk-inspired The King Is Dead.

So some four years on, have the Decemberists now turned their hand to Guetta-aping folktronica?

Thankfully not. Instead, over the course of this 14-song collection, the band, who play Dublin next month, remind you they wooed in the first place.

And Meloy is happy to take the plaudits and flowers thrown at his feet: “We know you built your life around us. Would we change? We had to change,” he sings on opening track ‘The Singer Addresses His Audience’.

“I’m not going on just to sing another summer song. So long, farewell,” he tells the fans who refuse to move on with the Decemberists. There’s more shedding of their booksmarts in ‘Cavalry Captain’.

It’s big, not clever, going for a killer hook and an infectious earworm.

The closing track, ‘A Beginning Song’, is the album’s high point, a slow-burning, twisting and gorgeous five minutes that has Meloy opening up his heart, letting everyone see the beauty the Decemberists are capable of creating.