Review of "The Decemberists"

The Decemberists

Picaresque

this is my album of the year, period. I don't think I'm going to bother voting for anything else at all.

This album is fantastic.

I guess I'm a sucker for the hometown boys but I just love their sound!

A strange patchwork of an album, it suffers, to my mind, from sounding at its best when it reminds you of other bands. "Eli, the Barrow Boy" longs to be a Richard Shindell song. "The Engine Driver" wants to sneak off and find a time machine to slip onto an early R.E.M. album. "We Both Go Down Together" would fit seamlessly into one of Morrissey's albums. And "16 Military Wives," if you strip out much of the production, could easily be a John Gorka song.

Which is not to accuse the album of being derivative - The Decemberists fit these disparate sounds into a coherent and evocative whole. But it does leave me unable to quite feel the Decemberists vibe as much as everyone else - I'm much too busy feeling a dozen other vibes.