Your first two selections of albums to review are great choices. There were only about five worthwhile album releases in January and you picked two of them. John Vanderslice's talents as a songwriter, musician and producer are remarkable and only a handful of people have noticed that Vanderslice has released two perfect albums and six near perfect albums since 2000.
My favorite Vanderslice album is Cellar Door (2004) which along with Pixel Revolt (2005) qualify as the "perfect" albums; while Mass Suicide Occult Figurines (2000), Time Travel Is Lonely (2001), The Life and Death of an American Fourtracker (2002), Emerald City (2007), and White Wilderness (2011) are the "near perfect" albums. Only one Vanderslice album, Romanian Names (2009) has been less than stellar. I can't think of another musician who has pieced together a better body of work in the past decade than John Vanderslice.
From my perspective, The King Is Dead matches up to every other Decemberist album, on a song by song basis. Frankly speaking, I was getting weary of their fixation on the minstrel balladry of the British Isles folk tradition. The elegant simplicity of The King Is Dead may not please the Decemberists early fans but it lays the foundation for creative expansion by the band.
The King Is Dead is the Decemberist's first foray into the music of their American homeland and a wise movement away from their earlier interest Celtic influenced music of Seventies UK bands like Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and Pentangle. When you add up the large number of Celtic influenced American musicians like the Decemberists, Fleet Foxes, Espers, Faun Fables, Joanna Newsom, and Fern Knight, there's more American groups performing Celtic influenced folk rock than Celtic influenced bands in all of the nations under the British crown. It would be nice to see some of those neo-traditionalist American bands bring it all back home by tapping into rich streams of Americana's folkway traditions.
It's no coincidence that Peter Buck and Gillian Welch are guests on the album because much of The King Is Dead sounds like a hybrid between the neo-Americana folk rock of R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction and Gillian Welch's more traditionalist Appalachian influenced album Hell Among the Yearlings.
Again... thanks for your first rate journal. Keep up the great work.
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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt
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