>>7283429Who could be embarrassed to play the Hammerstein Ballroom, and of all people, Colin Meloy? This guy couldn’t wait for success to validate his ego, powering half a decade of dilettante dalliances spanning Civil War period costume, Japanese folk tales, Irish solidarity poses, and his recent declaration that the Decemberists are “a wartime band.” Right, Colin, America’s iPods are burning. But more confounding than any contradictory professionalism is Meloy’s core conceit: He believes he is a gifted and entitled writer, fit to tackle and retranslate whatever mythologies interest him.
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In addition to indulging his Anglophile streak (solo acoustic Morrissey and Shirley Collins cover EPs), the Decemberists released The Tain (2003), inspired by the Ulster cycle, the centerpiece of pre-Christian Celtic mythology. Just as Meloy flubbed “pleased tea” for “greased tea” from the Mozzer’s “Everyday Is Like Sunday,” he mouthed off about the impact the “tay-n” cycle had on him. It’s pronounced “torn.”
In the past, the Decemberists’ 17th-century laments were merely soaked in solecism?coy cunning from a clever aesthete with a woodcut fetish who’d seen Rushmore too many times. But Meloy is increasingly emboldened by success, becoming more and more literal. You get the sense he scans encyclopedias for his cautionary chides, casually selecting tales famous as the boogeyman in their native lilt and fashioning them into cuddly Wes Anderson pirouettes, an indefensible, objectifying condescension born of bravado and ignorance. Meloy is so embarrassed to be from Helena?and America generally?that he wraps himself in pasts and cultures he could never understand, in an effort to co-opt their dramatic import. I’m sure somebody in his family is Irish, but it’s the predefined, tidy, and glorified certainty of this history that’s Meloy’s inspiration, not his ostensible, however distant, roots. He’s overreaching?at best, he could gradually improve and evolve into our generation’s Andy Partridge.
