A Cynic's Dream

[March 16th, 2005] As my uncle once told me, the only surefire way to lose a cynic's trust is to tell him to trust you. Although he said this as he was explaining how to sell raffle tickets at my church's fall festival, the tactic has universal application.

Take rock music. One of the greatest challenges facing popular songwriters is the modern-day cynic. Found everywhere, we cynics can appear to be an impenetrable wall of boredom who have heard the sappy songs and calls to arms and, frankly, are sick of it all.

So what the cynic needs is not U2, one of the last rock bands pleading for the world to believe in itself, or Bright Eyes-a man pleading for the world to believe him. What the cynic needs now is someone we know is lying to us. We need Colin Meloy.

As the yarn-spinner of local pop darlings the Decemberists, Meloy has been crafting tall tales of great improbability for five years. On Tuesday, the Portland band will release Picaresque, adding another batch of songs to its quickly growing discography (three full-lengths and a couple of EPs in four years) and probably launching another volley of lazy writeups referring to the literary character of the band's songs.

The literary pop tag isn't unwarranted: Meloy's stories on Picaresque, told with a craftsman's lyrical wit, bring to life mariners, a spy, the ghost of a barrow boy and more. Since most of the characters inhabit a pre-industrial world where the silver lining has been replaced by a black coal outline, reading the album's liner notes might feel like reading the spillover from a college British Lit course.

But Meloy's exotic characters and settings are just templates. The barrow-boy ghost mourns a lost love; the mariner trapped in a whale's stomach is caught between revenge and compassion, and the agent of espionage is, well, another vehicle to tell of lost love.

It's how the 30-year-old songwriter fleshes out the familiar outlines of his songs that makes Picaresque one of the most arresting releases of the year, and it's not something Meloy learned in a classroom. Instead, he learned songwriting craft years before his move to Portland in 1999. He started hearing a different way to tell stories back while growing up in Helena, Mont., listening to mix tapes his uncle Paul made for him.

Meloy listened intently to R.E.M., the Replacements and the Smiths, learning everything he could from the pioneers of college rock. In the mid-1980s, those musicians gained popularity by shirking arena rock's pomp and disco's good times, while inviting a deep cynicism gobbled up by the effete Anglo music fans populating American campuses. Here was Michael Stipe losing his religion, here was Paul Westerberg losing a record deal for being too drunk to play, and here was Morrissey losing his will to go on.

Those artists might seem a far cry from the Decemberists' orchestral arrangements and twisted storytelling, but the roots are the same. "Sixteen Military Wives" celebrates the arrogance of America's leaders and celebrities who claim to have all the answers with a fanfare-filled march that ends with cannibals eating the entire lot. "The Sporting Life" jauntily pokes fun at the absurdity of high-school sports from the point of view of an injured star athlete. "The Mariner's Revenge" celebrates taking calculated retribution in a narrative that recalls Jonah and the whale, in a song with all the foreboding eeriness of a man gone mad. The stories are hard to disregard because, while the plots are unbelievable, the messages are honest.

After hearing musicians decry country, religion and social Darwinism for decades, it becomes difficult for jaded fans to believe in the music. But the Decemberists do something different: By putting their characters in amusing hats, the message sneaks through.

But Meloy isn't just a writer of dirty little morality plays; he also has a heart, and the love songs on Picaresque are as believable and beautiful as any being sung right now. Maroon 5 might sing about waiting all day in the rain for a girl with a broken smile, and the Killers might sing about the fevers of a jealous lover but, to the cynic, these musicians just sound like they're trying to get laid.

On "Of Angels and Angles," Meloy couches his love in a short plaintive song in which the narrator is slowly drowning while holding hands with the woman he loves. The tragedy of the song is invented, of course, but the sentiment is undeniable. Of course, Meloy could also be trying to get laid. But in his case, at least, the cynics aren't as suspicious.