And you may have my precious bones on my return

[sovay]

I don't know if the Decemberists' The Hazards of Love (2009) is a folk opera, a song cycle, an indie-rock concept album, or a universal truth, but it is a thicket of ballads and I delight in its existence. Essentially, the plot is an expansion of "The Drowned Lovers" (Child 216) to allow for the interweaving of "Tam Lin" and "Reynardine"—an enchanted lover, a murderous rake, a possessive queen, pregnancy, shape-shifting, child ghosts, the river's marriage bed; it may be possible to follow the narrative while unfamiliar with the tradition it was created from, but one of the album's chief pleasures lies in how these stories are braided to interact with one another, mother's malison and all. None of it sounds like Anne Briggs, of course. She's not so much with the prog and acid. But the lyrics can be formal and archaic enough to pass for Trad.; there may be some of the mad storm and skirling of Steeleye Span's "Twa Corbies" in songs like "The Queen's Rebuke / Crossing" and "The Hazards of Love 3 (Revenge!)" and neither Fairport Convention nor Archie Fisher would look totally askance at the tongue-twisting "The Hazards of Love 1 (The Prettiest Whistles Won't Wrestle the Thistles Undone)." The title track of this post, "Annan Water," is straight out of Nic Jones.* In short, I love that The Hazards of Love is a mainstream release, when in fact it's as obscure as an Alexandrian epyllion. Maybe it's the zeitgeist (in which case nineweaving's intrinsicate, folkloric, PW-praised Cloud & Ashes: Three Winter's Tales should sell a million copies and we'll all be happy). But even if not, I'm glad someone is writing Child-inflected strangeness with fawns and forests and missel thrushes and taiga; daemon lovers, promises. They're hazards worth hearing about.

* You know, the more I think about this album, the more I wonder if its closest taxonomical relative isn't Peter Bellamy's The Transports: A Ballad Opera (1977). The styles are not comparable, but the spirit is rather like; and if you think Colin Meloy sings wiry and nasal, check out Bellamy sometime.

Comments

[sovay]

I need to hear more of the Decemberists, I think.

I tend to recommend them on general principle. You being someone who likes ballads, especially so: The Hazards of Love is the most explicit expression, but they have always done work with murder ballads and chanteys and folksong forms, all the while sounding like the post-prog indie-alternative outfit they are. They write story-songs, whose rarity in the field I have occasionally lamented. I don't know who else would open a song with, My mother was a Chinese trapeze artist in prewar Paris, smuggling bombs for the underground, and she met my father at a fete in Aix-en-Provence. Or pen the only song-cycle based on the Táin Bó Cúailnge I have ever heard. Here come loose the hounds to blow me down.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

It's interesting stuff. I need to listen a few more times to get the feel of their sound properly. (I've not really listened close to anything but trad in years, in case you'd not guessed that already.)

I love that "My mother was a Chinese trapeze artist..." line. And I quite agree about narrative songs.

Or pen the only song-cycle based on the Táin Bó Cúailnge I have ever heard.

Thanks! I'm listening to it right now. Very interesting.

I know that Horslips did an album titled The Táin, but I don't have a copy. Don't think I've ever actually heard it, truth to tell, except maybe one track of it once as an example in class. (They're sort of odd--I don't think they were as successful at combining trad with rock as some of the English and Scottish bands, but it's interesting stuff and I should probably listen to them more closely.)