If there's one thing the members of The Decemberists don't have to worry about, it's the sophomore jinx. The indie-pop quinet avoided the legendary curse of delivering a disappointing follow-up to a breakthrough album by effectively unleashing its first two records on top of each other. The band's latest effort, Her Majesty the Decemberists debuted to high acclaim in September, just four months after its label, Kill Rock Stars, re-released its formerly obscure debut, Castaways and Cutouts. And so a tough one-two punch introduced to the scene the literate, thoughtful songwriting of frontman Colin Meloy and the versatile musicianship of his bandmates. The only downside is that the band split its own vote at year-in-review editorial meetings across the country.

Cast members of the film “Cold Mountain” take a break while Jack White sings an old-style ditty. With The Decemberists’ musical flexibility, it could happen.

Meloy, speaking on the phone from his hometown of Portland, Ore., is glad people are still getting into his first album as the band celebrates the release of its new EP side project, The Tain. “We haven’t really gotten sick of playing the songs,” he said. “I’m glad it was able to see the light of day for the second time around. It’s gotten a lot more exposure than it would have otherwise. We’re pretty proud of it and wanted to see it get its due.”

Word continues to spread as the band hits the road again, with a performance in Salt Lake City’s Kilby Court on Thursday, March 11.

The Tain was recorded for Madrid-based indie label Acuarela, of which Meloy was a fan before being approached to record the EP last spring. “It’s sort of hard to come by. It’s going to go a bit under the radar, I think,” Meloy said.

The Tain isn’t exactly a five-song EP, Meloy said: “It’s actually one song that’s about 18 1/2 minutes long. It’s in five parts and it’s based on The Tain, which is an Irish mythological cycle—like The Iliad of Ireland.”

Once Meloy came to this ambitious concept, he scrapped the initial plan to record a conventional EP. “I’d just been reading part of Thomas Kinsella’s translation of The Tain and it just struck me as something that would be perfect to write a long, epic song about in the vein of ’70s prog rock,” he said. “And we’d been working on this EP and we were just going to put a collection of about five normal Decemberists pop songs, but decided that it would be a good opportunity to explore something risky. So I ended up writing the whole thing in a weekend and the band worked on it for a week and we were ready to record.”

The Decemberists’ recordings display a great deal of stylistic variety, but the progressive rock influence hasn't been as prevalent as that of artists like Robyn Hitchcock and The Smiths. This recording changes that. “It definitely has nods to Iron Butterfly and Deep Purple in places, but it’s still a discernable Decemberists song,” Meloy said. The story itself suggested the sound to Meloy. “It’s Irish myth, so you wouldn’t go about it in any normal pop way. Immediately, it was like, yeah, this is going to need some riffs in it for sure.”

Many of Meloy’s lyrics are based in literate themes, which come from both Meloy’s degree in creative writing and his general urge to consume good art. “Books I read, movies I see, music I listen to— it all funnels in,” he said.

One such movie is John Schlesinger’s 1963 film “Billy Liar,” a relatively unknown landmark of British cinema starring Tom Courtenay as a small-town young man who dreams of greater things, yet can’t find the courage and energy to escape his boring life. The song of the same name from Her Majesty the Decemberists recalls the feelings without simply retelling the plot. “I’d seen the film and was influenced by it. The character that is in ‘Billy Liar’ isn’t necessarily the same Billy Liar, but is kind of a composite of a bunch of different characters feeling the same sort of lethargy and laziness,” he said.

Meloy’s well-read mix of inspiration feeds an impressive lyricism that doesn’t always accompany musical creativity, and a vocabulary that’s even rarer in pop music. The distinctive old-English sound of his words entrances some, but others find it inpenetrable. Meloy says he isn't trying to sound obscure, but to transcribe what’s in his head. “I’m not very deliberate about it… I don’t necessarily think of myself as someone who goes out of his way to use big words,” he said. “They’re words that you would see in writing and novels and things like that. Maybe it’s a little out of place in songwriting, but I don’t think that’s any reason why they shouldn’t be used. I think a lot of the words themselves have a nice alliteration to them and a nice poesy.”

“I think that there’s a lot of really inventive stuff happening in the indie world,” Meloy said, mentioning The Shins and Innocence Mission as two of his favorite current acts, but he isn’t sure where to place his band beyond the broad description of indie-pop. Meloy’s lyrics and eclectic folk-influenced pop have frequently earned the band comparisons with Neutral Milk Hotel, but Meloy attributes the similarities more to shared influences than the two bands’ individual sounds.

“I don’t know how well we fit in. Sometimes I wonder if we don’t fit in that well at all. We certainly wear our nerdiness on our sleeves. But then again, I like to think that we hold up to some of the better songwriters in the medium today,” Meloy said.

“From the get-go, we set out that we’re doing our music on our own terms and we’re not pandering to anybody in particular,” he said. “Naturally, I think we’re going to put off some people— maybe more people than your normal indie band. But I think that has drawn people to us as well.”

The band employs a wide and somewhat fancy (some might say non-indie) array of instruments to accomplish the sound of the album, and doesn’t scale it down for the live show, even in small venues like Kilby Court. “We still do everything that we can, regardless of the size of the venue. Granted, it’s easier on a larger stage— we take up a lot of room. But we make due. We’re all agile enough to deal with size restraints. We don’t think we should compromise anything for the size of the venue,” Meloy said.

Another aspect that attracts people to the band is the design and artwork of the albums and the band’s Web site (www.decemberists.com). “Carson Ellis is the illustrator, and also my girlfriend,” Meloy said. “She started doing artwork for us, doing fliers and things like that. And then it just immediately followed that she should start doing record covers, and it just started to create this really cohesive environment for the artwork that I thought was really conducive to the music itself… It’s been nice to have a sort of strong image to our artwork stay true from record to record.”

The band will be recording new material this summer and the CD will probably be out in February or March of 2005. “You take what you learn as you go. The next record is definitely going to be a collection of songs like the other records, but pretty diverse. We’re upping the diversity quotient as we go.” The members of The Decemberists have already shown an ability to produce cohesive albums with diverse styles, and after last year's double-dose, fans will be craving another hit.

The Decemberists play Kilby Court on March 11. The show starts at 8 p.m. For more information, visit www.kilbycourt.com.
jeremy@red-mag.com