6/10, Radio City Music Hall: The Decemberists, Robyn Hitchcock and The Venus 3

Thank god for The Hazards of Love. No, really.

In the weeks running up this show, I kept bouncing back and forth predictions for it in my head. An unending argument of sorts.

"Okay, The Hazards of Love is probably their worst album."
"Yeah, but it's The Decemberists."
"And they'll probably play predominantly Hazards songs."
"Yeah, but it is still The Decemberists."
"Touche."

I am a world-renowned expert in Parliamentary Debate, you see.

It turns out, of course, that I was quite mistaken about many things. But I'll get to that soon enough. I hadn't been to Radio City since maybe the early 1990s, for a Rockettes show, so I was naturally excited to see my first actual "show" in such an esteemed venue. The acoustics of the place were certainly fabulous, and the architecture and interior designs certainly lived up to reputation--although the latter distinctly reminded me of the Borgata. Moreover, the place is obviously huge, and yet still it preserves a degree of intimacy that--obviously--stadiums and arenas lack. Plus, my seats were terrific.

Robyn Hitchcock, of Rachel Getting Married fame (well, fame might be a stretch), and The Venus 3, his R.E.M.-drawn back-up crew, opened the night. They were fairly rocking and fun, despite Robyn's innumerable failed attempts at garnering laughs from the audience. R.E.M.'s Peter Buck was looking a bit haggard--picture the unwashed lovechild of Christopher Hitchens and Mona Lisa (the model or the painting). But they certainly yanked together some tight rhythms, evoking something along the lines of a modern Yardbirds, or a less musically-adept Dire Straits. Just good and solid, with some nice guitar interplay between Hitchcock and Buck.

The Decemberists stormed the stage after only a short break, and it quickly became clear that this was going to be a Hazards-centric show. The Decemberists typically alternate between folksy anthems about sailors and the English countryside and blood-pumping prog rock epics about weird shit going on in Colin Meloy's head. The Hazards of Love, however, is a bit different; a concept album in the truest sense of the term, it constantly repeats riffs and codas, rambles on incessantly about topics I can't afford to devote more than scant attention to, and weaves--without pause--in and out of country hymns and Zeppelinesque guitar crunchers. Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Dream Theater, Rush, Queensryche, The Wall--it's all there, in one way or another. Now, The Hazards of Love isn't bad, per se. It's not even mediocre. It's just that the two albums preceding it--Picaresque and The Crane Wife--were so good that the response to Hazards becomes similar to those of Beatles fans, who were used to Revolver, Abbey Road, and The White Album, having Let It Be dumped in their laps. Hazards is the epitome of the "if any other band had done it..." record, a good album that suffers immensely from expectations.

The show, for me, worked in diametrically opposite fashion. Because of the permeating aura of meh surrounding Hazards, my expectations were lowered. And low expectations is the foundation upon which many of life's most enjoyable events occur (US version of "The Office"; Role Models; Korean BBQ; White Blood Cells). Of course, as you can probably discern by now, I thought the show was awesome. They played solely Hazards songs before the first intermission, came back and did a few of their earlier, more well-known numbers, and then rocked out in an explosive finale with their perennial closer "Sons and Daughters" and a cover of Heart's "Crazy in Love."

Okay, so, the bad: I don't think they performed a single song from Picaresque, and they didn't do either of the epic eponymous jams from The Crane Wife. They avoided "Odalisque" and "The Legionnaire's Lament," both of which are gorgeous and both of which I was anticipating hearing, perhaps delusionally. They also don't differentiate from their album versions much, and are--by design, of course, as a concept-album band--very scripted. They had a few moments of fun spontaneity--first where Meloy divided the crowd and assigned different sections vocal instructions, like chorus practice, and then when he invited two stragglers on stage to duel off in the worst game of real-life Guitar Hero ever--but for nearly the entirety of the rest of the show, every note, chord, fill, and lyric was simply a replica of the studio version. And this, I believe, is partly because not a single member of The Decemberists is all that skillful a musician, broadly speaking. They just don't have the chops to go off on random tangents of improvisation. Granted, it is the rare band these days that does--Dave Matthews and co. certainly stand as an aberration in this regard--but I think it's still worth noting nonetheless. The Decemberists would seem to be a band, from a genre standpoint, whose music is highly conducive to occasional bouts of unscripted mania. But it just doesn't ever seem to happen.

HOWEVER, the principal and unavoidable strength of The Decemberists' entire catalog is this: they are phenomenal songwriters. They rarely, if ever, produce clunkers; Picaresque and The Crane Wife do not contain any songs worth skipping. Meloy, aside from having a great rock voice, just has an amazing knack for melody--be it uplifting or melancholy. This is an exceptionally good characteristic in 90-110 minute live shows, where it's often possible or even likely for the audience to start looking at their watches because the song being currently played just isn't up to snuff. With The Decemberists, this is a nonissue, as those songs don't exist. Moreover, I quickly learned that the fact that Hazards was going to be the source of the majority of the songs that night was hardly a detriment. And this is because its songs, simply put, are stifled by studio walls. Now, one might argue that all acts are better live, and--to an extent--this has a large degree of truth to it. But, after last night, I can only conclude that listening to The Hazards of Love through headphones in one's room does a marked disservice to the songs, from "Isn't It a Lovely Night?" to "The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid" and "The Hazards of Love 4." There's a feeling of total sonic immersion one gets from seeing these songs performed live (and in an acoustically awesome venue) that is not only not present but is replaced by a permeating sense of passivity and distance on the album itself. Part of this, as I said, is simply the unavoidable fact that most bands are more fun to hear live than recorded. But there's something to be said for The Decemberists' stage presence, and, specifically, for that of the wonderful female additions, Shara Worden and Becky Stark, for the Hazards album and tour.

For perhaps the majority of the pre-intermission set, I was no less than mesmerized by Becky Stark. She was dressed in a elaborate white gown of some kind, and looked like a cross between Cinderella and Sophie Marceau's Princess Isabelle in Braveheart. She had a certain majestic air bout her, which was certainly not diminished in the slightest by her dancing. In overly sexualized and sultry fashion, she slunk, shook, crooned, and made scoliosis-inducing waves with her spine--all in constant rhythm with the music. Her voice, which is a noticeably beneficial addition to the album, simply exploded into mellifluous harmony at Radio City, ricocheting off every wall. And no less can be said about My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden, who, in true Aguilerian fashion, unendingly shocks everyone with an Arethaesque set of pipes. Both of their contributions, as the chief drivers of the band's stage energy and supreme vocalists in the truest sense of the term, were enormous; without them, I could easily have had a much lesser opinion of the show. Indeed, their aforementioned cover of "Crazy on You" highlighted all of this--the singing prowess, the dancing, the rock stardom, and, if you'll allow me to project here, the ability to hold rapt the eyes of every male in the room--to the fullest effect possible. Alternating verses and choruses, their performances, which were supplemented by a tight arrangement on the part of the rest of the band, evoked memories of the greatest guitar face-offs (Lynyrd Skynyrd, Clapton and Allman, Petrucci and Satriani). It's a rare breed of "indie rocker" that can hit the Wilson sisters' highest notes.

Rare, indeed.