The Hazards Of Love

When 2006's The Crane Wife turned out to be The Decemberists' most cleaned-up/straightened-out album to date, fears arose among the faithful that the band's leap to major-labeldom would engender some kind of dumbing-down commercialization process. Those fears can be unreservedly placed aside with the arrival of The Hazards of Love. The ambitious, conceptual, prog-rock-influenced side of the band, which goes back at least as far as their 2004 EP The Tain, bears full fruit here. The music press is hypersensitive to the great prog demon's presence, so critics made too much of the few brief Rick Wakeman-like flashes on the last album. This time, however, the Gates of Delirium (look it up, indie slacker) are flung wide open. The album begins auspiciously with a lengthy, organ-driven instrumental overture, for God's sake, and the whole thing is presented as an unabashed concept album, with each track flowing directly into the next. There are few overt prog tropes here, mind you, just the aforementioned grand scale and conceptual theme. What's the connective thread running through the songs? As with all great concept albums, who really cares? At least, as long as the music itself works as well as it does, that's all you need to know.