A wet and muggy Monday night, and College Street Music Hall was wide awake. Warmed up by Lady Lamb, members of the audience, packed in shoulder-to-shoulder and bathed in a dusky red light, wiggled and fidgeted, whispering to each other. Would their favorite song make it into the lineup? Was this really everything it was cracked up to be?
They wouldn’t have to wait long to find out. Fifty pairs of hands rapped lightly on the metal gate separating the stage from the audience; 50 more tried to approach it with iPhone cameras ready in hand. The moment they had been waiting for was almost here.
And then, it arrived. A think layer of white smoke carpeted the stage, mingling momentarily with a spot of blue, a hint of purple. Then the hall faded to black, the intermittently blinking lights of equipment visible as introductory instrumentals blared over loudspeaker. A glass of red wine in hand, frontman Colin Meloy emerged from the shadows. A roar rose from the audience. By the end of the night, they would be hoarse from screaming.
Performing a two-hour, double-encore set for a crowd of 2,000 Monday night, Meloy and his Portland-based Decemberists gave one of the best shows the College Street Music Hall has seen yet. Indefatigable from start to finish, they entered the Hall with a bottomless bag of musical tricks and emptied it methodically throughout the night, charming the audience completely as they wove through old and new hits – and a few surprises – from a fairly exhaustive discography.
I associate the Decemberists’ music with coming of age in a way that is clichéd to a fault. Although the rhapsodic, sometimes needling vocals of members like Meloy and Jenny Conlee are what have distinguished the group within the mainstream, it is their literary sensibility and masterful, punchy way of storytelling that draw me back every time. The Crane Wife filled my ears (and I am certain, tens of thousands of others) as I learned to navigate the awkward territory of college relationships; The Hazards of Love played as I fell violently in and out of it for the first time. The King is Dead is the only thing I have ever stolen in a breakup, and I played it on repeat when I packed a suitcase and moved halfway across the country for a job. Polished but frank and folksy on these albums, Meloy doesn’t sound outright like he’s appealing to Warby Parker’s target audience: he sounds like he’s singing right to you.
As The Decemberists opened on “The Singer Addresses His Audience,” band members filtering out onto the stage one by one, that intimacy spread through the Hall. The show became at once an intensely personal and communal affair – some couples canoodled while others fist-bumped with new friends, waved their hands high in the air, and swayed en masse during pieces like “16 Military Wives” and “The Mariner’s Revenge Song.” Meloy has audience banter down to a science in a way that feels deeply genuine: covering tracks from Picaresque through What a Terrible World, What A Beautiful World and then some.
A nod here also to Lady Lamb (Aly Spaltro), who energized the audience with her home-brewed, spunky brand of indie folk/rock.
Together, both groups personalized the show markedly. While New Haven remained, regrettably, the town with Yale in it – “I know you’re all going back to your stone castles,” joked Meloy at one point – members from each act also shared personal , town-specific anecdotes that made the show. Meloy went funny, with his spot-on “looking out into the audience, I feel like I’m at an eyeglass convention … You my people, you my people,” but also wasn’t afraid to be serious, sharing that the intro to “What a Terrible World, What A Beautiful World” was written in response to the Newtown shooting while his wife was pregnant with their second child. “I’ll end with something more upbeat!,” he promised at the end of the number.
He was true to his word. By the time the audience filtered out, the stage was littered with confetti and, still peeking out from the curtain, the giant outline of a whale. Cries for “one more song!” popped up from places in the dispersing crowd. And nearly 2,000 smiling faces exited onto College Street, into a July night that sounded a little like music.
I did not attend this show, but I was at the Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit show there on Wednesday, July 22.
I'm surprised that the Decemberists were able to play there on
Monday, since Isbell's performance blew the roof off the College Street Music Hall that night.
Anyone searching for someone to listen to in today's wasteland of what passes for music should check out Isbell's catalogue, including his time with the Drive-by Truckers. Don't be scared off by people typing him as Alt-Country/Americana artist. He is a master songwriter, and mostly definitely a Rocker.