How I love being an amateur music journalist, when you get to blag last minute tickets to see The Decemberists at the Hammersmith Apollo in order to review their support, Blind Pilot.
While I heartily support Blind Pilot and the lovely press officer who allowed me to see this show, I was feeling a bit out of sorts and so am not entirely 100% pleased with the review. It was also hampered by the poor sound quality during the act themselves. Very unfair, especially considering the similar nature of the instrumentalism in both bands, which should have been reflected from the start. I find it hard to believe the sound engineer could cock up in a venue like that, or that such enthusiastic bands would fail to do thorough sound tests.
But anyway, this bit here is my excuse to talk about The Decemberists. As with all great timeless acts, their music is hard to describe. I told a friend that a lot of it has a sort of 'sea-shanty' air but to be honest I think I'm selling short the breadth and depth of American music history by saying that. Their roots echo genres that I only have the vaguest idea about, such as bluegrass, but they still retain a large amount of good ol' rock and roll. YouTube has already served me well and allows me not to tell, but to show part of the actual performance:
They OBviously polished off the show with a rousing version of 'The Mariner's Revenge'. The whole audience pretending to be swallowed by a whale was the most fun I've had in a long time. When's the last time you just really, genuinely screamed as if you were being swallowed by a whale? Never.
The whole evening was what I would call a proper rock show. I had thought that as a group they might fall in to the "serious musician" category, coming out, sincerely playing a decent mix of recent releases and top hits (they totally eschewed 'Red Right Ankle') and then disappearing without a word. But Colin Meloy is one of the funniest frontmen I have ever seen. Not just incidentally throwing out witty lines, but being absurdly engaging and charismatic, more at home on a stage than I have ever seen anyone be, let alone a dumpy guy with flattened dark hair, thick glasses and a so-last-season lumberjack shirt. The theatricality made the songs... you could almost tell that if they hadn't been playing the music, they would have been leading the crowd dancing to it. I can't even remember which song it was, but the entire venue was swaying in perfect unison, mirroring the band exactly as they moved on stage. It's this kind of intense bond which can form between crowds and artists that makes a band more than just a group of successful musicians, that makes an live show truly memorable. Gig-goers will be used to the varying types of posturing and hero worship which go on, where even stage-diving or throwing your guitar to the audience merely amp up the persona of 'incredibly rock and fucking roll', but when an artist actually complains about how far away the audience is due to the stage barrier (c'mon, who would crowdsurf on that night?), you feel a little bit more gratification at taking the time, and spending the money, to see these people. And that's part of what music really, really is about. OK?
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