The Decemberists are the little band who arguably transformed the town of Portland, Oregon from a cool rock hub to the globally recognised home of facial hair and acoustic guitars. Their love of lyrically rich and history-indebted folk-rock propelled them from outsiders to the top of the US album charts in 2011. A year later, they affirmed their pop culture status by appearing in an episode of the Simpsons as Springfield Elementary’s new music teachers. “Who wants to learn a song about press gangs and infanticide?” deadpan singer Colin Meloy asked of a nonplussed class.
Now back in London, Meloy is busy warning the children in the crowd – and their parents – of an onslaught of upcoming swearwords in Ben Franklin’s Song, but adds: “You’ll get a great history lesson.” So far, so Portlandia. But the Decemberists are changing. Since the 2015 release of What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, the band have been quietly shearing away their trademark storytelling in favour of direct appeals from the heart. Their latest album, I’ll Be Your Girl, is galvanised not by mandolin but steely synths and Peter Hook basslines.
Although this new approach makes up almost half the 17-strong set list, the band skilfully sift through their back catalogue. The lofty musical theatre of The Queen’s Rebuke, sung artfully by backing Kelly Hogan, plunges into fuzzy, dirty guitars for Severed; the textbook, wordy O Valencia! plateaus to the isolated plea and soaring, cathartic pop of Once in My Life, a highlight.
The band are impressively responsive to one another despite Meloy’s admission that they’re jet-lagged. “But we’ve been here four days, it’s no longer an excuse,” he admits. Drummer John Moen’s passionate playing is watched with awe by Meloy, who is equally beneficent to multi-instrumentalist Jenny Conlee as she swaps between accordion, keyboards and synths. The singer himself keeps a steady hand on a boisterous crowd. He chides the front row for looking at the set list pinned to the floor at his feet and not being receptive enough to the inclusion of “a mining song”, Rox in the Box.
Meloy also takes great pains to explain the concept of audience participation. Although the days of Decemberists shows featuring audience requests drawn from a bingo cage and band members participating in fictitious battles are over, crowd involvement still plays an important part in their gigs, from the call-and-response refrain of skewed nursery rhyme We All Die Young to the shrill scream elicited to evoke the feeling of being eaten by a whale during The Mariner’s Revenge, which features bass player Nate Query using his cello as a pretend paddle and an inflatable beast being passed through the audience.
Meloy, too, has his own impish fun. During a segue from O Valencia! into Dracula’s Daughter, the singer digresses into an anti-Trump diatribe. “He’s gonna get thrown in jail, he’s gonna rot in jail,” he sings gleefully. The self-professed Morrissey fan uses the space during the vaulting chords of Once in My Life to indulge in the words of his hero and sings an excerpt from the Smiths’ Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want. Judging by the clamorous response for the Decemberists’ blend of old favourites and new vision, Meloy’s prayer might just have been heard.
• The Decemberists play 02 Academy Leeds on 10 November; then touring.
• This review has been amended to correct the titles of Ben Franklin’s Song and We All Die Young
