New feature! I am going to tell you what you should listen to. I’ve had people ask me where they should start listening to some bands, so I thought it might be helpful to write up a little guide with that in mind. Everything that I listen to is excellent, of course, but it can be difficult to choose an in, as it were. Today we will look at The Decemberists‘ catalog. (Click the clicky for their Myspace page, with some tracks, to listen to.)

The Decemberists write songs which I have heard described as ‘hyper-literate.’ It was probably intended pejoratively, but there is this sense of over-the-top storytelling to most of their songs—and storytelling it is, from “My Mother Was A Chinese Trapeze Artist” to the entirety of The Hazards of Love—which is integral to the music. They are not silly songs, but they are often tongue-in-cheek. They are amusing even as they are entirely serious. Even the tracks which aren’t storytelling bear Colin Meloy’s distinct lyrics, someone who loves words and wordplay (he majored in creative writing at the University of Montana). If you don’t think you can enjoy a song about pirates, whales, and revenge, then perhaps you should find another band. If you think that rhyming ‘Miranda’ with ‘veranda’ is overbearingly pretentious, The Decemberists are not for you. If the idea of writing an 18-minute EP about an obscure Irish pre-Christian folk tale sounds dull and unlistenable, read no further.

For those of you who stayed, an excellent place to start is with their debut album, Castaways and Cutouts. It is exquisitely put together—I don’t think I could name a track on here I don’t like. It is probably one of their more accessible albums, and, as their earlier stuff tends to be, is less rock or pop, a little darker in tone. From the sad ghost story (all good ghost stories are sad) of “Leslie Ann Levine” to the winding sunset of “California One / Youth And Beauty Brigade,” the album is very pretty. It frequently vies for my favorite of theirs, and makes a good starting point.

I have never been as into Her Majesty, their sophomore album, as much as any of their other material. It is not bad, certainly. Some of the tracks—”Shanty for the Arethusa,” “Red Right Ankle,” to name a few—are among my favorites of theirs. But the album, while similar in tone to Castaways (a little more country), seems thrown together. Some of the tracks are forgettable, or feel like fillers. The closing track, “As I Rise,” is a very weak follow-up to the epic “I Was Meant For The Stage.” It is worth getting eventually if you need more Decemberists, especially if you want a little more of their Castaways-style material, but I can’t whole-heartedly endorse it.

Their next full-length album is Picaresque. The word means ‘roguish,’ and also refers to a form of Spanish literature. This album contains a lot more grandiose storytelling than their earlier material, and has a lot more rock and pop. It features songs about a Spanish infanta, a mutual suicide pact, spies caught in a web of romance, maritime revenge, et cetera. If you prefer exciting to soft and dark this is an excellent place to start. The closing track, “Of Angels and Angles,” is probably the weak point of the album, but it is by no means a weak song. It merely pales compared to “The Mariner’s Revenge Song,” and is easy to forget entirely.

The Crane Wife, their fourth work, is another departure. The album is dominated heavily by two multi-part song cycles: the titular “The Crane Wife,” and “The Island.” Together these two cycles take up a half hour of the album, and easily shape the mood of the rest of it. The Crane Wife is the story of an old Japanese folk tale; The Island is, ultimately, a maritime adventure story based, inter alia, on The Tempest and “The Highwayman.” This is another solid album in terms of construction, and the closing track, “Sons & Daughters,” is one of my favorite closers (especially live, which surprised me). It has a nice balance of lengthy songs about folk stories and rape and catchy pop songs about star-cross’d lovers and dead Yankee soldiers. Some of the tracks have a definite edge to them.

Their most recent album is The Hazards of Love, and it is a rock opera. The story, roughly told, is that of a shape-shifting forest dweller named William, his lover, Margaret, and his jealous mother, the forest queen. William and Margaret have a tryst in the forest, in which she falls pregnant, and goes forth to look for him. They are reunited, but his mother is jealous and has Margaret abducted by a murderous rake. William tracks Margaret down and (spoiler alert) they both die. This album has some beautiful vocal work by Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond and Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond, and, if the idea of the album hasn’t turned you off to it, is definitely worth purchasing. It is probably a good idea to be used to the Decemberists’ general sound first, but that’s what Myspace is for, isn’t it?

There’s not really a lot of room for EPs and singles here (especially as I don’t own all of them), but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention The Tain, which is an 18-minute long song about a pre-Christian Irish folk tale. It is appropriately epic, and if you’re a fan of longer tracks, worth looking into.

Okay, expect like eight hundred more of these.