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There is an opening band for this show, which is called Cass McCombs but seems to be three people. It's very gentle, folky stuff, with pretty harmony, but I only catch about a song and a half, and it's a little hard to concentrate on gentle and folky in such a large and crowded room. The Decemberists are also pretty folky, but not really gentle. I should preface my comments on them by revealing that I'm a recent fan; I first heard of them with their radio hit, "Sixteen Military Wives," from their last album. It appeals to me because I've always loved the combination of a bright, sunny melody with very dark lyrics. This turns out to be a major strength of this band. So, while I'm interested in hearing them play unfamiliar (to me) older material, I sort of hope that they'll lean heavily on the album they're touring for, and I am not disappointed. First, though, we get an older song of theirs that morphs or segues into another and another without pause (even when they move around and switch instruments mid-transition) before the first song makes a reappearance. I can't tell if they've just jammed several of their songs together for the performance or if it's one larger, more highly structured work. (I later learn that it's the latter, a piece called "The Tain" that they released as an EP.) Either way, it's awesome. The band is a six-piece, with a drummer (who occasionally ventures out from behind the kit), a bassist (switching between upright and electric, with lots of rich bowing on the upright), a dedicated keyboardist (who sings a bit of harmony), an occasional keyboardist/occasional guitarist (who also sings a bit of harmony), a violinist who sings a lot of harmony, and a frontman who sings most every song and plays a lot of guitar, mostly strummy acoustic but occasionally also electric. There's a constant buzz of reconfiguration between songs. Early in the set, they seem pretty stiff onstage, which makes the between-songs breaks drag a bit, but they actually seem much more relaxed and comfortable with each other than with the audience. (The violin player, especially, sings [beautifully!] like a disgruntled statue, but smiles and laughs at little intra-band jokes that we're hard-pressed to discern from out here.) Later on they loosen up quite a bit; it seems to help when the frontman plays a small solo acoustic segment in the middle of the set and someone in the audience yells for him to take off his shirt. (He was asking whether we liked his tie, so it was kind of sequitur.) He seems flustered, but also pleased. The songs are just gorgeous, with lovely tunes and freaky great harmonies, and they do lean pretty heavily on the new album. They're pretty resolutely mid-tempo, which I notice but don't get bored by, I think because they mix the rhythms up with a lot of waltzes and several different eight-counts. They end their encore with an audience participation request: for "The Mariner's Revenge Song," we are all asked to scream as if being swallowed by a whale at the moment of the whale's appearance. ("You live on the coast. You've probably seen whales. You can sort of extrapolate from that.") It's a silly, feel-good ending to a noticeably feel-good night.
