Front page photo by Autumn de Wilde
The Decemberists’ country-influenced new album The King Is Dead is due January 18 in North America via Capitol and a day earlier in Europe via Rough Trade. Don’t expect a grand-scale rock opera like 2009’s The Hazards of Love, though. Rather, this one sticks to a simpler shade of stripped-down Americana, according to a press release. That’s the cover up there.
R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck plays on three of the album’s 10 songs, and roots-country wailer Gillian Welch guests on seven. Longtime producer Tucker Martine once again manned the boards, and recording took place on a farm outside Portland, Oregon. You can download lead single “Down by the Water” here, and the band will play it on “Conan” November 18.
In a press release, frontman Colin Meloy calls the album “an exercise in restraint”: “Over the last 11 years or so, since I moved to Portland, I feel like I’ve been mining mostly English traditions for influence. I guess I’ve kind of come back to a lot of the more American music that got me going in the first place– R.E.M. and Camper Van Beethoven and all these bands that borrowed from more American traditions like Neil Young and the Byrds… Sometimes I kind of miss the epic-ness of the other albums, but it’s nice to get all of the information across in three minutes. It’s like going from reading a novel to reading a bunch of short stories.”
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