Forgery League

The Decemberists play quiet singer-songwriter pop… or that’s what it sounds like on the surface, at least. Listen to the lyrics and things get rather ghoulish. The drawings that adorn their album covers provide a clue in their passing resemblance to Edward Gorey: the music, too, has a similar love of the macabre and the gleefully morbid. The songs on Castaways and Cutouts depict the anguish of a child’s ghost, a mother with a ruinous secret, and other unfortunates. Even the otherwise fairly playful “July, July!” has a line about a gut-shot gin-smuggler. It’s as grim as anything Gorey wrote, but it could perhaps use a bit more whimsy.
Singer Colin Meloy has a fascination with soldiers, bygone eras (they’re named, after a fashion, for the Russian Decembrists) and terrible poverty (babies “raised on pradies, peanut shells and dirt”), looking all sorts of ghastly things right in the face and finding the terrible beauty in them. Romanticizing? Well, yeah. But it’s pretty compelling. And the melodies are lovely.