Alright, I’ve been putting this off long enough. The Hazards of Love is easily the most formidable recording in The Decemberists‘ discography, and to be truthful, it’s not one that I expected to like nearly as much as I did when I revisited their first five albums during my 2000s binge last year. Framed as a continuous story that plays out over the course of 17 tracks and just shy of an hour, with several voices acting as distinct characters in the tale being woven, this album is The Decemberists at their most ambitious, their most melodramatic, and at times, their most macabre. The Crane Wife in 2006 is regarded by many (myself included) as the band’s magnum opus, but it took real gusto to even attempt to follow it up with something more complex than what was already a fairly progressive song cycle with a satisfying block of hook-driven singles in its center. On Hazards, it’s debatable at times whether there are even distinct songs, considering how seamlessly almost every track segues into the next, with the divisions between them (no doubt made for the sake of listeners’ convenience so that we didn’t end up in a Jethro Tull sort of situation) often seeming a bit arbitrary. This is a formidable record to approach, let alone to write about. But since I updated my “Best of the Ought Nots” list at the beginning of 2021, and over the course of the year, I set about filling in the gaps where I hadn’t yet reviewed some of the new entries yet, eventually I was gonna have to get to this one, even if in all honesty I was kind of scared to do it. It’s October, and Halloween is right around the corner, so I can’t think of a better time to recap such a fantastical and nightmarish story, and to stare my fear right in the eye.
The backstory on this album is basically that lead singer Colin Meloy, who is a fan of folk singer Anne Briggs, heard her 1963 EP The Hazards of Love and thought “Hey, isn’t it weird that she didn’t actually put a song with that title on the EP?” So he set about writing a song with that title, and pretty soon it became like 4 songs with that title, and eventually the whole thing snowballed into a series of songs all haphazardly (see what I did there?) crashing into one another in the process of circling back to that central theme. I guess it’s a good thing that his bandmates were on board back when he decided to lead off their very first album with “Lesley Anne Levine”, a song written from the point of view of a stillborn infant, or when they put together the sickening yet perversely satisfying “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” to serve as the apex of their third album Picaresque, featuring a young man so hell-bent on getting payback that he’ll follow the guy he intends to torture to death into the belly of a freaking whale. Imagine a band without that history looking at some of the dark lyrics Meloy came up with for Hazards – they probably would have doubted his mental stability. Meloy’s tendency to pull fascinating bits of characterization out of the most macabre of premises, while I found it rather distasteful when I was first exposed to the band, is something I’ve grown to respect them for over the years. With that said, the results can still be downright disturbing if you’re not in the right mood, and there’s a specific character on this album who is directly responsible for a few of those stomach-turning moments. That’s part of the reason it took me so long to get back around to Hazards, even after declaring it one of my favorite records of the decade it came out. It’s a record that I always find fascinating when I pull it out after having left it alone for a while, but I can only handle so many listens in rapid succession before I need to put it away again. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – if this thing was a movie, I’m not sure I’d be able to watch it all the way through. But I’d probably still respect it for how effectively and viscerally it evokes feelings of sympathy for its heroes, and pure hatred for its villains. From: https://murlough23.wordpress.com/2021/10/30/the-decemberists-the-hazards-of-love-tis-better-to-have-loved-and-lost/
