The Decemberists & Lavender Diamond - London Shepherds Bush Empire - 8/1/07
4/5
By: Thomas Hannan
There are only a few crowds in front of whom Lavender Diamond would really work as a support act, and the weedy bumbling geeks who fawn over The Decemberists - once again, we include ourselves in that deprecation - are one of them. It's not that this is the kind of hippy indie folk that only your heavy metal crowd would count as airy-fairy, rather this is so delicate, so cutesy, that even your average indie-rock gig goer would turn their nose up at it. Christ, imagine Becky (Lavender Diamond's eponymous front woman's perfectly adequate birth name) before a Babyshambles crowd...
They'd slaughter her. But everyone in this horde is very fond of their own open mindedness, and as such the delightfully and unashamedly hippy Becky is given a chance. In front of these sympathetic eyes and ears she shines. Despite the delicacy and simplicity of her music (tunes which often revolve around bracingly uncomplicated lyrics, albeit delivered in the most honeyed of tones), there's a noticeable confidence about her stage presence, waving her swathes of fabric around to emphasise little musical flourishes and talking to the crowd as if they were entirely subservient to her melodies. A little more time to accustom ourselves with the subtleties of her tunes (and believe me, there are subtleties), and maybe she will indeed have us eating out of the palm of her henna-tattooed hand.
Everyone's already at that stage with The Decemberists. Their triumphant current LP 'The Crane Wife' was many things - hugely melodious, tender, sensitive (all things that every Decemberists record is), but more so than any we've heard recently, it was inventive, progressive, exciting - the sound of a band who knew their own supreme intelligence and wanted to explore it and see if anyone came with them. They did, in their droves - to the record stores at least. But has success in such a brave venture gone to their heads? Where before they were playful and jolly (though good enough at it to be taken very seriously indeed), is there a danger of their live sets now coming across as a little... self important?
No, although noticing this isn't instant. It starts with the first two tracks from the new album (something that requires a good twenty or so minutes), and for a moment you ponder whether the first half of the set will be just that 'The Crane Wife' performed from beginning to end, every lengthy keyboard solo kept staunchly intact. Then you let the melody of the opening 'The Crane Wife 3' wash over you and stop worrying about it for a minute. Next, you notice how silly The Decemberists themselves find the subsequent twelve minute long epic 'The Island' and everything's OK - this might be daring, it might be decidedly prog, yes, but it's still first and foremost fun! It's intelligent music taken seriously but performed with a wry smile.
After the lunacy of that behemoth of a song, there's only really one other lengthy passage - 'The Crane Wife 1 and 2', a decidedly less sonically challenging piece - in a set which is otherwise full of alarmingly celebratory music which has the whole of Shepherd's Bush Empire, at the band's request, in fine voice. It's a testament to how much they're genuinely enjoying themselves that when they prompt crowd participation it feels like the first time they've ever attempted it, although trawling the world wide web for reviews of recent shows will reveal that the banter provided seems to be almost identical every night. Yes, it does feel a little bit forced come the third time it's attempted, but it's all very good natured - re-enactments of American civil war battles between band and crowd included.
Those two epics aside, it's a set split between either sparse, heartbreaking / spooky (sometimes both) tunes like 'Shankhill Butchers' and the rapturously received and affectionately delivered 'Eli the Barrow Boy', or full band romps like the triumphant 'Sixteen Military Wives', the uplifting tale of joint suicide that 'We Both Go Down Together' is and 'Sons & Daughters', which closed the first part of the set with a polite stage invasion. It's fast becoming a signature tune. By now, singer Colin Meloy's delight can hardly be contained - not only is he being revered like some kind of demi-god, but he's got Mike Scott of the Waterboys, a childhood hero, playing on stage with him.
The Decemberists are fast becoming a serious concern, racing away from merely being cult favourites towards being full on pop stars quicker than you can say 'ridiculous key change'. That they're doing it by pushing both themselves as musicians and their audience as music fans is an excellent thing. That they maintain this amount of humility and humour in the process of experimenting and expanding their horizons is nothing short of miraculous.
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