The Decemberists
As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again
60--90点相当
リアルタイムでは、評価が芳しくなくとも
年末には選ばれているタイプ。
6年前の前作も、2メディア以上から選出という結果になっていた。
初期は、Pitchfork に
最近は、Paste に支持されているか感じ。
It’s been six years since the Decemberists last released an album, a period that you can imagine frontman Colin Meloy describing as “a lustrum and twelvemonth.” It’s the longest interval between LPs so far for the Portland band, and the break seems to have served as something of a reset—one that has resulted in the longest album the group has made to date. It’s also one of their best. As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again boasts Meloy’s sharpest songwriting in more than a decade, on songs that step away from the synth-forward approach of the band’s 2018 album I’ll Be Your Girl in favor of the chamber-pop sound that characterized the Decemberists’ earlier work.
Returning to a previous musical approach doesn’t mean rehashing old ideas. On the contrary, As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again sounds fresh and focused, with tight-knit songs that are by turns playful and pointed. After a period of burnout and doubt about the band’s future, Meloy is in peak form on lyrics that often feel haunted, by ghosts that are sometimes allegorical and sometimes literal as the band moves between baroque story-songs and more sober-minded reflections on mortality. The former style has long been the Decemberists’ trademark, cemented over the years by selections from Picaresque in 2005, much of The Crane Wife in 2006 and the entirety of The Hazards of Love, the proggy album-length fairytale the band released in 2009.
ポートランドのバンド
9th
初期は名盤級が続いていた。
Picaresque
Her Majesty the Decemberists
Castaways and Cutouts
