Through the mid-2010s, The Decemberists indulged their more R.E.M.-like side, including having R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck join in on several tracks from their 2011 album The King Is Dead. The Americana-infused album may stand as my favorite of theirs, ahead of classics like The Crane Wife, or their big rock opera The Hazards of Love. 2015’s What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World continued their jaunt into a (slightly) more straightforward rock style. There was their excellent 2017 English folk rock side project Offa Rex, with singer Olivia Chaney, which produced the album The Queen of Hearts. The 2018 Decemberists album I’ll Be Your Girl, which added a heavy synth sound reminiscent of Depeche Mode and a depressive lyrical bite reflecting post-2016 despair. I’ve happily welcomed all these albums into my regular rotation, and was glad to see songs from them performed live, even if it meant the audience lapsed into bored spells. As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again will be The Decemberists’ first album in six years, and an epic double album no less, featuring help from R.E.M.’s Mike Mills and The Shins’ James Mercer. I’m already loving the prog excess on the first tracks released, and they sounded great on stage.
Much of Jenny’s life—and that of many who inhabit the Mountain Goats universe—resembles a Greek tragedy. Darnielle’s understanding of the structure is, if the characters in these stories were able to read the messages and symbols correctly, they’d be able to avert the tragedy—but the only way they can develop the language necessary to read them is to go through the tragedy and be destroyed by it. It’s a paradox that’s cyclical and demanding yet crucial to the continuum of humanity. Darnielle sang about this 19 years ago on We Shall All Be Healed. The line from “Palmcorder Yajna” that goes “It will be too late by the time we learn what these cryptic symbols mean” speaks largely to how the tragedy gives us our own lives. “You would make a lot of different choices, had you been able to know what those choices meant for you right before you made them but, unfortunately, to know what those choices were going to mean, you had to make them in the first place,” Darnielle says.