There is a word for what Colin Meloy does on Picaresque, and that word is maximalist, though it doesn’t quite cover the smell of salt air and library dust that seems to cling to every track.
Released in March 2005 on Kill Rock Stars, this was the album that took the Decemberists from a beloved Portland curiosity to something you’d find in the CD wallet of anyone under thirty who owned a corduroy jacket. It deserved every bit of it.
The Cast
Meloy wrote the whole thing — obsessively, characteristically — but the record only breathes because of the people around him. Chris Funk on guitars, banjo, and roughly seventeen other things. Jenny Conlee on keyboards and accordion, which is to say she is the album’s soul. Nate Query on bass, John Moen behind the kit. Moen had replaced Rachel Blumberg not long before recording began, and you can hear the band still figuring out what that meant — which turns out to mean a slightly harder landing on the backbeat, and it works.
The album was recorded at Kung Fu Bakery in Portland with Tucker Martine engineering. Martine has a gift for making rooms sound like rooms, and here that means the accordion doesn’t float above the mix like an affectation — it sits in the same air as the bass drum.
The Songs
“The Infanta” opens things with a procession. Not a riff, not a verse — a procession. Strings, horns, and Meloy’s voice announcing itself with the confidence of someone who has read too much and means to prove it. You either fall in line or you don’t.
“16 Military Wives” is where the album gets dangerous. It’s a protest song dressed as a show tune, which is a harder trick to pull off than it sounds. The bridge hits like a cheer from a pep rally inside a Bertolt Brecht production, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.
“The Mariner’s Revenge Song” clocks in at eight and a half minutes and asks you to believe in a whale. You will.
What Meloy understood — and what makes Picaresque hold up twenty years on — is that literary artifice and genuine emotion are not opposites. “Eli, the Barrow Boy” is a ghost story that makes you feel something real. “Of Angels and Angles” is so spare and plain-spoken after all the pageantry that it lands like a hand on your shoulder.
Why It Still Matters
The indie folk moment of the mid-2000s produced a lot of records that sound like documents now, artifacts of a specific aesthetic moment that has since passed. Picaresque doesn’t feel like that.
It feels like a book you keep on the shelf. One you lend out and then want back.
Tucker Martine’s production ages particularly well — there’s no compression fatigue, no era-specific sheen. Conlee’s piano on the quieter tracks has real weight and decay. Funk’s electric guitar on “We Both Go Down Together” is cleaner and more restrained than you’d expect, which is exactly right.
Put this on at volume. Not background volume.