Album Release

Missoula to Music World: ‘I Told You So’

By Courtney Lowery, 3-23-05

	Picaresque (Kill Rock Stars)

It's about time people started talking about Colin Meloy.

There's a new album out there (released yesterday) that any follower of indie rock from Iowa to Seattle will feverishly pick up off of racks, but the voice may sound a bit more familiar to us Missoulians. To everyone else in the country, they're the Decemberists. To us, however, they are the band formerly known as Tarkio.

Oh, how we loved Tarkio. We flocked to smoky bars and bobbed our heads and bought their makeshift albums at Rockin' Rudy's. We tuned in every time they hit KBGA. But we grew apart when front man Colin Meloy left for Portland about five years ago. We've all grown up since then, and so did Colin Meloy. His voice is the same -- that haunting, quirky trill that does something fresh in your ears -- but the music has grown into something much more innovative, much more refined and now, much more popular.

According to the Seattle PI Meloy and the Decemberists have, with Picaresque (Kill Rock Stars), their third full album released Tuesday, "moved from being an esoteric folk band with a scattered regional following into a national success."

Personally, I take great pleasure in watching manic message boards that follow the Decemberists' every move and then cry out for old Tarkio albums when people find out the front man used to have a band in Montana of all places! I have to smile because I still have all those old Tarkio albums. There's always a strange giddiness when the world just finds out something you've known all along.

Meloy's fan base is almost always built organically -- he has an unobtrusive way of getting songs into your head and then you become one of those gushing fans you make fun of. The Decemberists are almost always fun, thought-provoking and just damn catchy. For full disclosure, I should tell you that as a 19-year-old arts writer for the Montana Kaimin, I covered Tarkio's last stand in Missoula and developed a smallish crush on them. Then, when I saw the Decemberists in the tiny Myrna Loy Center in Colin's hometown of Helena a few years ago (the audience consisted of basically me and Meloy's family), the crush just got stronger. I couldn't help it. In fact, I still can't.

The Decemberists are playing soon across the West:
In Salt Lake City March 28 at the Lo Fi Cafe,
in Boulder March 29 at the Fox Theatre
and fittingly, in Helena at the Helena Middle School on April 12.

Give an ear to the newest album and you'll see why. Picaresque is the kind of album that you'll listen to for two weeks straight and get something new out of each time you press play. It's a lot of what you should love about music -- poetic lyrics, a twinge of folk (which I take as being Montana roots), and something new you're not sure how to describe, but it makes you feel like you're in some sort of artsy, epiphany-ridden independent film.

And, it sounds more like the Meloy I remember as a college student than the one I now listen to on the Decemberists' first two albums. There is less accordion (Which I really did love on Her Majesty The Decemberists, but it got a little gimmicky in its heaviness) and less of the tangential roughness we heard when the Decemberists first formed. The album has a few great ballads (I'm a sucker for those) including "Angels," the last track, and a few of those familiar-sounding "Sister Nebraska"-style beats that just make a person happy, like the second track, "The Sporting Life." Per usual, the Decemberists strike this nearly literary chord with this album. It's complex -- a history lesson, a classic novel and a modern art exhibit all in one.

This is the kind of indie rock that a person can sink their teeth into. The indie rock scene can be a tough one to break. Sometimes it feels like a job to listen to it, but you think you should because it's not on the radio and represents something new and different in a homogenized music culture. Well, the Decemberists are different. They're still artsy, raw and creative, but they don't make you immediately feel like an outsider if you don't dye your hair black. And the music takes you on your first listen. It still has the "I'm cool because I like this" vibe, but stops short of "I like this -- so that makes me cooler than you." I like Bright Eyes and Conor Oberst (who the New York Times called "Mr. Sincerity" and an "earnest indie hearthrob" on the front page of the Living section) and have great regard for Saddle Creek Records (based in my former home of Omaha, Nebraska) but frankly, I'm getting sick of seeing his mug on the cover of every national publication within reach. I vote for Colin Meloy as the new poster boy indie rocker who can and should go mainstream.

And when he does, Missoula will be able to say, "I told you so."

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