Stretching the truth

Sound's like Jesus on the mound!

Some 75,000 people flocked to Portland’s waterfront Sunday to watch Barack Obama speak, making it the biggest rally the campaign has held to date. Thousands stood on the lawn, dozens watched from boats and from the bridge stretching across the Willamette River...

This one and other stories neglected to report that Barack was "preceded by a rare, 45-minute free concert by actual rock stars The Decemberists", who I might add, are enjoyed by this blog.

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The Decemberists Fire A Broadside at Madison

Much has been made of The Decemberists' sold-out show at The Orpheum on Friday. Rob Thomas from the Cap. Times sums it all up tidily.











Steve S also did a smashing job with his once-in-a-lifetime Dane101 pre-show interview with opener My Brightest Diamond:

Steve: So you're on Asthmatic Kitty records, you've got a song about rabbits dying, you've got a song about, if I read it right, bringing an old workhorse to the glue factory...

Shara: Saving him!

Steve: Aha! Saving him! Well, I was going to ask, "why do you hate animals so much?" But...

Shara: [laughs] The problem is that I love them!














While My Brightest Diamond's unique sound was stellar back at The Annex in the fall (and as Steve mentions in the interview, I loved her rendition of "Tainted Love"), she really hit her stride opening on Friday night for a monster crowd. Several people around me had never heard of her before and marveled as her near-Wagnerian voice and gritty guitar swelled effortlessly to fill the vast space. The Led Zeppelin cover "No Quarter" didn't hurt either. She seems to have, at least in this city, become the first lady of "openers for hard-to-classify eclectic alt. indie rock acts." Who's next? Cloud Cult?



















The Decemberists themselves were actually hit or miss in my book. I'm admittedly not a fan of most of their latest somewhat blase material ("Oh, Valencia" excepted - and the "Shanskville Butcher" was done to good effect), preferring the quirky vignette folk historicism of classics like "The Infanta", "Eli the Barrow Boy", and that leviathan of music, The Mariner's Revenge Song.



Now, when The Decemberists did 'hit,' it was like a broadside from a man o' war off Trafalgar. They saved "The Mariner's Revenge Song" for last, doing the near-impossible, sparking a large modern audience into an absolute riotous frenzy with a sea shanty featuring a lineup of accordion, string bass, mandolin, drum, and guitar. My video above captures the climax of the song after the band had been 'eaten' by a whale and lay dead on the stage, their instruments strewn about. The upper balcony was bouncing in an unsettling manner. It was all ridiculously good fun for our sizable crew upstairs.














"The Tain" was not what I would've picked for an encore, but the band was probably smart to choose it - it calmed the feverish crowd down and facilitated a reasonable close to the show.














Colin Meloy's random monologue about Otis Redding climbing out of what he meant to call Lake Monona during "Sixteen Military Wives" was quality (and slightly ironic, as Redding's plane crashed into the lake in December). I won't forget the Civil War duet with Meloy and Worden soon either.



















All in all, well worth the while.

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