Blimey! The Decemberists return for album number 9. As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again is a truly amazing addition to their canon.

Release Date: 14th June 2024

Label: YABB Records (via Thirty Tigers)

Format: CD / Vinyl / Cassette / Digital

Back, back, back, with a barrel full of bullets to boot, if there is a whiff of excitement here, don’t judge me, judge for yourself. It feels a long swerve since Mr. Meloy and band issued any new, with last studio outing back in 2018. Then, for I’ll Be Your Girl, it appeared they were exploring some new, to them, technologies, with synthesizers being added to their palette. Have they now gone the full electro? (And now you’re worried…)

As if. From the second the first song, Burial Ground, bursts, and I mean bursts, out the speakers, it is with the most potent earworm any bastard son of the Byrds and R.E.M. could ever produce. Going straight for the jangular, this is the most joytastic construct you’ll hear all year. If the guitars weren’t perfect, mariachi trumpet comes in around the halfway mark, and the match between Meloy’s never stronger vocal and the backing vocals, with additional from guest, James Mercer, of The Shins, are just glorious. Marmite vocals, they say of Meloy? Shut up and eat your soldiers. Song of the year, and some.

Still buoyant, Oh No is a never more Meloy-esque piece of whimsy, with hints of oom pah pah and operetta sharing the bed, a sort of Brecht and Weill go Beaverton, Or. Upfront, both on this and the track before, is the emphatic bass of Nate Query, mixed high in the mix, a supportive match for the loping melody. Some flute wafts over the beginning of , and indeed throughout, The Reapers, a song that could come from either the old west or an even older England. The lyric is perhaps less bucolic than at first it seems, a song of warning, as: “We wait for the reapers to mow“. Under the trilling woodwind, it is Jenny Conlee’s piano that propels this one along, aided by the rhythmic forward pulse of John Moen, on the drumstool.

This triple whammy goes promptly quad for Long White Veil, another R.E.M-alike, awash with pedal steel, and this is as strong an opening gauntlet as this band have ever managed. Or many others. If Chris Funk hadn’t earlier caught your attention, this player of guitar, steel, dobro, banjo, violin and a whole lot else, will have by now.

For those of you reading this review in vinyl, it should be noted that this is a double LP, and that there is a distinct flavour inhabiting the four sides. So as disc one is flipped, side two is a distinct drop down, excising much the rock from the folk. William Fitzwilliam could be a Child ballad, and the tune a distant memory of Woody Guthrie’s Deportees. Conlee adds harmony to Meloy, her accordion another gentle accompaniment. Picked acoustic guitar is the scaffold, with Funk adding more steely heft, with a most pleasing solo gratefully received. Don’t Go To The Woods then sounds exactly as it should, a forbidding cautionary tale, a harbinger of doom clad in, never mind sheep, in lamb’s clothing. Darn, this is good.

The Black Maria inhabits a similar something wicked this way comes territory. Just as you are thinking that this run can’t continue, some mournful brass provides a beautifully brooding backdrop, scotching that thought even before it fully forms, with Meloy intoning his doleful message: “For when it comes for you, nothing to be done for you, write down your name on the dotted line“. I see their PR has come up with “Darkness You Can Dance to” as a metaphor of description, and it is so apt, although a melancholy sway may be more accurate. All I Want Is You strips things right back, initially just voice and guitar, before those horns sneak back in. Struggling to see who responsible, I’m guessing the trumpet is probably Victor Nash, who is a live member of the band, with maybe the ubiquitous Funk on sax.

Birdsong and a sotto voce 1,2,3,4 usher in Born To The Morning and what must be side three, a further stylistic shift again apparent. A strident 60’s sounding anthem, replete with sonic whirrs that reference more the experimentation of, say, The (where the the was still important) Pink Floyd, than the lush synthesisers of any more modern era. Fuzzed guitars and repetitively pounding piano joust with a choral chant that reeks of a patchouli scented psychedelia.

America Made Me is then a rousing campaign mantra, based around a simple piano motif, ragtime brass and a simplistic drumbeat carrying forward Meloy’s understated, I think, cynicism: “America made me, America saved me from myself“. There is tuba in there too, as there jolly well should be. As a stand alone, it might pall, but, by now, they can make anything shine, given the competent production of Tucker Martine, now back on board, after resting out the album before, explaining, perhaps, the rejection of new and the return to form.

Tell Me What’s On Your Mind continues in the vein of baroque pop that this side is clearly showcasing, with cheesy organ, where cheese is good, allied to a foot tapper of no small retro merit. I’m hearing the Turtles across all of this side, extraneous bah-de-dahs all that are missing. Never Satisfied chooses to next go all weird on us, the vocals coming in over a junkyard of collected sounds, rounded together by some steel guitar. A leftfield ballad, it hangs together with a yearning soul of ennui. (And, yeah, I know exactly how that reads and sounds. Man.)

The grand finale has caught a fair bit of interest, given it is a side filling epic, Joan In The Garden, at just under twenty minutes, garnishing plaudits such as bonkers and prog nouveau. I guess it falls into three parts, the first starting as a fairly conventional finger picked evolution; the fact that Mike Mills guests here, on vocals, is no small clue as to the influence again tapped loud. As the verses unwind, so too a, presumably, mellotronic choir chime in. It is rather lovely. There is a near subliminal burble of synth beginning to bubble, as timpani and tubular bells provide OTT percussive notes.

Meloy begins to wail, and this only makes sense if you have heard this all in real time, without pauses all along the way. “Hosanna, hosanna“. (Pretension requires certain parameters.) Into the void it then plummets, along with that sequenced synth pattern; think the before dawn interlude in Floyd’s ‘Echoes”, if longer and more demanding. This does, it’s true, stretch attention but is worth it for the joyous denouement. Stadium rock guitar bangs into gear, with thumping drums, the amalgam a mix of Queen and Blue Oyster Cult, with Conlee adding a swirling flourish of hammond, so as to join up all the dots. The synth adds some Final Countdown additional and it is all tremendous bravado, quite against type. It can only end well, which it does, on a sixpence.

Colin Meloy has suggested this their best album yet. Of course he does, this being the clarion call of any and every artist midway through their third decade of music making. But, this time, you know, he may well just be right. The first album is wall to wall sublime, but the oddness of the second disc take it to another level. I think the Decemberists may well have just gone mega.

Catch the magnificent jangle of the opener, Burial Ground, below. You can pre-order the album here.

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