Jealous exes can be such a drag — especially when they are forest queens.
Although The Decemberists are not strangers to weaving an intricate story line into their albums (The Crane Wife had tracks loosely based on Japanese folklore), most fans probably did not brace themselves for this. A “rock opera” by definition, The Hazards of Love is a 17-track minstrel show vocally typecast to perfection.
If you’ve heard only a track or two, don’t dismiss it just yet. As it turns out, judging Hazards by one track is like basing a movie review on one scene. Set aside an hour and decipher Colin Meloy’s inexplicable Portland accent from start to finish.
The narrator is William, the doting gentleman with a dark past, sung by Meloy. His sweet lover Margaret is sung by Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond. Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond takes on the role of the evil forest queen, the dead ex-lover of William with a vengeance.
The overall style of Hazards emphasizes the action instead of the music. Each song bleeds into another; many songs sound similar with folksy guitars, harpsichords and percussion. Climactic moments are marked by the crescendo of power chords and backbeats in the same way they are in most rock operas. There is at least one important riff that is repeated several times and molded instrumentally depending on the context.
We are introduced to our heroine by the narrator in track two, “The Hazards of Love 1,” after a palate-awakening prelude. The language would make most English majors happy: “You’ll learn soon enough / the prettiest whistles won’t wrestle the thistles undone.” The follow-up track borrows instrumentation from its predecessor and introduces Margaret’s joyous pregnancy. This is enough to send the forest queen into a rage. We’ll find out why later.
Margaret begins singing in track four, as she enters the taiga — Colin Meloy is not satisfied with calling it a forest. Her voice is light and Disney-like; she is reveling in her pregnancy and ready to go find her lover to tell him about it. It becomes obvious how removed this story is from the world we live in when “columbine” is sung in reference to a flower.
We meet the bitter forest queen in track six, “The Queen’s Approach,” on which she proclaims, “I’m / made of bones of the branches / the boughs and the brow-beating light / while my feet are the trunks / and my head is the canopy high.” Yes, she’s a tree. As weird as that seems, it’s no stranger to the form of a fairy tale, which this song more or less is — except for that whole happily ever after thing. Her voice is thicker, darker and more soulful in comparison to Margaret’s youthful, innocent singing.
“The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid” starts off with an ominous, minor variation on the main riff, performed by a single harpsichord. As William sings, the music builds up to flow into the queen’s loud, classic-rock sounding solo, when she proclaims in disgust, “This is how I am repaid.”
In “The Rake’s Song,” we find out what set the tree queen off. After we have already formed our opinions, the self-proclaimed “awful narrator” confesses how his unsatisfactory marriage with the queen left him with three little brats. After her death, he finished off the three children, wanting to start a new life. His newfound happiness crushes the queen, who is looking on from the forest.
The “Hazards of Love 3” is a creepy appeal from William’s dead children for revenge. We hear a group of children singing “Papa, turn the water down / The basin’s overflown,” set to haunting noises usually reserved for horror movies. Move over, Bright Eyes. The Decemberists not only put babies in bathtubs, but they make them sing, too.
The volume and tempo picks up as Margaret is abducted by the queen and thrown across the wild river. William is forced to set out and save her. The album ends with the lovely, poignant “The Hazards of Love 4.” The queen’s revenge is achieved: the two lovers wait to die on a sinking ship.
Unlike Coheed and Cambria, no graphic novel is needed to understand this book-on-tape set to music. There are no talking bikes in this one, just evil talking trees. Hazards of Love is certainly strange, but it’s also refreshing and timeless.
This is a nice review of one of the best albums of the year, but it unfortunately gets the plot of The Hazards of Love all wrong. Granted, that isn’t hard to do, what with Meloy’s shifting narrators and double-casting, and it takes most people a few listenings to really decipher the plot of this beautiful and tragic love story.
There are actually four main characters: William, Margaret, The Rake, and the Queen. Margaret rides into the forest one day only to come upon “a white and wounded fawn.” Attempting to help the poor fawn, she discovers that it is actually a shape-shifting man, who becomes her lover, named William. The next few tracks are about their ensuing love affair and Margaret’s discovery of her pregnancy by William.
In The Wanting Comes In Waves and later on in The Queen’s Rebuke/The Crossing, we discover that the Queen is not William’s ex-lover, but his mother, who had found him as “a baby abandoned, entombed in a cradle of clay.” The Queen posits that she was “the soul who took pity and stole him away/and gave him the form of a fawn to inhabit by day,” and is angry that he would throw away her love and affection of so many years for a woman he has just met. “This is how I am repaid?” she asks. William asks his mother for one night to do what he likes, free from his fawn alter ego. “You owe me life,” he cries, and his mother agrees, but with the condition that “if I grant you this favor, to hand you/your life for the evening, I will retake by morning.”
Next enters the character of The Rake, who is not William, though he is also voiced by Colin Meloy. The Rake, is turns out, was a young bachelor who was married early. Much to his chagrin, his wife’s “womb began spilling out babies,” saddling him with “three little pests” he most certainly does not want. When both his wife and fourth child die during delivery, The Rake decides it’s time for a change – “and so my burden I began to divest,” he sings. He kills each of his children, and, free of them, begins life as a rake and bachelor once again. He end his song with an eerie premonition: “You may think that I should be haunted/but it never really bothers me.”
The Rake, after telling us his history, then sneaks up on Margaret and abducts her, “having clamped her innocent finger in fetters.” He then rides away with Margaret, coming to the dangerous and wild Annan River, which he must contemplate crossing.
The Forest Queen shows up at this point, congratulating the Rake for removing the “temptation that’s troubled my innocent child.” She’s just happy to have Margaret out of the way, and in exchange for the Rake having abducted her, the Queen is willing to fly both the Rake and Margaret to the far side of the river.
William arrives at the river too late, and knows he must cross it to save Margaret. Unable to do so, he makes a desperate bargain with the river itself: “But if you calm and let me pass/you may render me a wreck when I come back./So calm your waves, and slow the churn/And you may have my precious bones on my return.” The river lets him cross, and he makes it safely to the other side.
Meanwhile, the Rake has taken Margaret captive behind “fortress walls.” He tells her not to cry out to William, because he cannot possibly hear her. However, Margaret cries out anyway (“O my own true love, can you hear me love?”) and William does indeed hear her. Just as he comes upon the castle, The Rake’s dead children make their re-entrance, hauntingly singing to their father, who had reckoned them gone forever. As the Rake is distracted and driven mad by his dead children, William and Margaret make their escape.
At last, Margaret and William cross the river together, even though for William this means giving up his life because of the deal he struck with the river. Margaret chooses to die with him, and they plaintively sing of their doomed love together: “So let’s be married here today, these rushing waves to bear our witness / And we will lie like river stones, rolling only where it takes us.” At last, as the boat slowly sinks into the wild water, they sing their vows to one another: “And with this long last rush of air, let’s speak our vows in starry whisper.” Finally, with no hope of survival left, “as the waves came crashing down, he closed his eyes and softly kissed her.”
So there you have it – a tragic love story, but a beautiful one. It takes a few listenings to get the logistics of the plot exactly right, but it’s definitely worth the time.
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wow, lindsey. sounds like your new year’s resolution is to try too hard.
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