Oh, the Hazards of pretension

When albums such as The Decemberists' latest, The Hazards of Love, turn up, it really raises the question of why The Who's Tommy hasn't gotten more grief.

Until Tommy, the first self-proclaimed rock opera, there wasn't much of a stigma surrounding so-called concept albums. If you think about it, most great albums have at least some vague concept tying the songs together and rock 'n' roll has always depended on theatrics. So it seems natural enough for any ambitious rocker to marry musical theater and rock.

The Kinks pulled off several successful concept/rock operas before 1970s excess spiraled downward toward Pink Floyd's beloved cheese ball, The Wall - a performance piece that hasn't aged nearly as well as many Floyd devotees will claim.

Rob Reiner's landmark mock rockumentary This Is Spinal Tap basically hammered the nails into the rock opera coffin with the absurdly hilarious "Stonehenge" number, dancing dwarves and all. Since the 1984 film, the rock opera has become something of a dinosaur, an old product of too much cocaine and ego that occasionally resurfaces against better judgment (ahem, Green Day's American Idiot).

This brings us back to The Decemberists, a band that has always sort of edged on the haughtier fringes of indie rock. Colin Meloy's literary/historical tendencies took a progressive (as in Jethro Tull) turn on the band's last full-length LP, The Crane Wife, a shift many thought might disappear after the release of the Always the Bridesmaid singles collection.

Alas, the prog rock is back on The Hazards of Love, which would be all well and good if the album didn't play out like a 58-minute farce in high fidelity. Meloy and Co. don't seem to be in on the joke - their latest album is a medieval puppet show of sex, infanticide and forest mysticism set to electric guitars and glockenspiel.

Margaret (voiced by Lavender Diamond's Becky Stark) ventures into the forest only to be surprised by William (Meloy), a shape shifter who seduces (or rapes, it's unclear but is forceful either way) and impregnates her between "The Hazards of Love 1" and "A Bower Scene."

Things gets wilder - the evil queen (Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond) objects to the relationship, William offs his kids and shows no remorse, etc. - and all is written off with the reprise, "Oh, oh/ The hazards of love."

Say what you will about Meloy's occasionally off-putting pomp, but the guy has been an ace storyteller in the past. From Castaways and Cutouts through The Crane Wife, he's built an extremely colorful cast of lovers, soldiers, performers and travelers. But on his latest, it's too difficult to connect to Margaret or William when the listening experience is so much more real and punishing than anything the characters suffer.

The hard rock riffs on "Won't Want for Love (Margaret in the Taiga)" and "The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid" conjure up everything terrible and Led Zeppelin-inspired, but like any good showmen, The Decemberists save the best for last.

Before leaving off somewhat gracefully with the mournful "The Hazards of Love 4 (The Drowned)," the band fires up a tour de force of tasteless rock opera blunders on "The Hazards of Love 3 (Revenge!)" and "The Wanting Comes in Waves (Reprise)."

Children choirs are always dangerous in rock music (though The Rolling Stones got away with it), but a dead children's choir, that's just something you don't really hear too often. To its credit, the album really does milk the train-derailing factor - it's fascinating just how quickly Hazards sinks into unknowing self-parody.

Perhaps what is most unsettling about the album is how it manages to suffocate the interspersed moments of beauty and ingenuity. The musical interludes ("Prelude" and "An Interlude"), though brief, offer the counter-argument: Despite the overall ridiculousness of the album, it's not without a few redeeming nuggets.

Of course, then, the question becomes how much corny '70s finger-picked guitar and maudlin crap are you willing to sort through for a few minutes of quality. The Crane Wife had plenty of fat around the edges, the worst of which ("When the War Came") hinted at the musical threads of Hazards. But the missteps were completely forgivable in an otherwise strong release.

Why Meloy thought he could bring high art to a low form like rock opera, we'll probably never know. It was a crazy thought and one he really should have resisted.

zherrm@gmail.com

RATING: 2 out of 5 stars