The Crane Wife

The Decemberists

album cover

A Great Work of Rock Summation

The Decemberists are the band to have around whenever one of your classic-rock-obsessed friends starts groaning about how nobody writes melodies anymore. Throughout The Crane Wife, the Oregon five-piece led by singer and songwriter Colin Maloy offers elaborate, heights-scaling themes that celebrate (and blur) various fixed points on the rock time line. Like the Arcade Fire (see p. 24), the Decemberists summarize lots of what's come before while striking out in brazen, unlikely directions. The story-songs on The Crane Wife could almost be answers to what-if questions: What if a band fluent in art rock and early Pink Floyd augmented that upheaval with floral Beach Boys vocal harmonies? What if the psychedelic mysticism of the Zombies was surrounded by stuttering jazz-fusion polyrhythms? What if the hushed folk introspection of Simon and Garfunkel melted into long instrumental journeys that furthered the spirit of the vocals?

The Crane Wife offers answers to these and other questions, but not in an elitist "our collection is bigger than yours" way. Maloy specializes in themes that are so simple they feel eternal. But being a bit of a contrarian, he'll juxtapose athletic church-organ arpeggios around those tunes, and nudge them just a few steps away from the expected. To hear Maloy's schemes at peak quirkiness, check out "The Perfect Crime #2" and parts of "The Island," two standouts on an album of many, in which the effusive refrains go places rock bands rarely visit anymore.

Genre: Rock
Released: 2006, Capitol
Key Tracks: "The Crane Wife 1 & 2," "The Perfect Crime #2," "The Island," "Sons & Daughters"
Catalog Choice: Picaresque
Next Stop: Doves: The Last Broadcast
After That: The Arcade Fire: Funeral
Book Page: 215

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#1 from Emily Randall, Concord, California - 11/02/2008 8:43

Every album by this band has a lot going for it, but The Crane Wife is remarkable for its two trilogies: the Crane Wife and The Island. The first is a fresh and heartbreaking retelling of a Japanese tale that proves love doesn’t always have a happy ending; The Island is almost Shakespearian in its violence and haunting mystery. So we’ve got depth. For breadth, there’s a searing heavy metal number about starving botanists in WWII Russia, a new broadside ballad about butchery in Belfast, and a transcendent Civil War duet. Dumb as a rock? Crane Wife is proof that rock can be smart, too.

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About 1,000 Recordings

Celebrate the joy, the revelation, the mystery, the fun, the sheer shivers-up-the-spine pleasure of great music.

Essential operas. Milestone rock albums. An education in the blues. The world of world. Classical from Bach to Bartók to Beethoven to Brahms. And dozens of unexpected gems, surprising discoveries, and long-lost masterpieces.

This is an online version of the list (published alphabetically in the book). The entries in the book break down genre bias and broaden every listener’s horizons—think Miles Davis to Claude Debussy to the melodic story-songs of The Decemberists. And the writing is passionate, informed, opinionated.

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