Extra, Extra!: Happy Decemberists Day!

In which I report on the latest in entertainment news.

It should come as little surprise to those of you who are familiar with my musical tastes that The Decemberists - a Portland-based indie rock band - are hands down my favorite musical group.  Their hyper-intellectual lyrics and often dissonant melodies represent everything that I look for - and infrequently find - in contemporary music.  They are, for instance, the only group that I can think of you can rhyme "Sycorax" with "parallax" and somehow not come off as pretentious, pseudo-intellectuals.

Fans of the band were treated to a double-helping of good news yesterday.  Not only was their new album - What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World - their first since 2011's The King Is Dead, released on Tuesday, but the city of Portland declared that day to be Decemberists Day, honoring the band's fifteen years of intelligent, literary and altogether off-beat music.

According to Mayor Charlie Hale, the band “embod[ies] the Portland values of passion, engagement and communitarianism with the Portland aesthetic of homegrown, forthright, slightly hippie and often bespectacled glory.”  The ceremony, held at 2:00 yesterday afternoon, included a reading by author Lemony Snicket.  Over fifty local businesses unveiled a quilt honoring the storied history of the band, with each business contributing a square to the final product.

Rather than spending their day marveling at their own magnificence, the band very matter of factly set to work, providing attendees with a free concert and album signing before heading to the airport in preparation of tomorrow's performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live.  They performed three songs at the event: "Make You Better" (from the newly released What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World), "Eli the Barrow Boy" (from Picaresque) and "Sons and Daughters" (from my personal favorite, The Crane Wife).

I cannot recommend the band highly enough.  Rather than relying on catchy refrains and repetitive choruses, their music is deeply ingrained in literary and folk traditions.  Their album Picaresques draws from a rich, if obscure, Spanish genre portraying the adventures lower class  rogues in a corrupt and overbearing society, while The Crane Wife draws heavily from Japanese mythology.  Throughout their discography are songs based on Shakespeare's play The Tempest, Keith Waterhouse's novel Billy Liar, American novelist Myla Goldberg, the Dadaist painting The Bride Stripper Bare by Her Bachelors, Even and the real-life Shankill Butchers.

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