Colin Meloy has a voice from another time. So it’s not surprising that he finds inspiration in topics that have a mythical, long ago feeling to them. The singer and primary songwriter of Portland, Ore.-based band The Decemberists often tackles lonesome, literary folk-rock fables about everything from Chinese trapeze artists to mariners stuck in the belly of a whale. That old-fashioned feel is partly due to their accordion- and fiddle-laden arrangements and partly due to Meloy’s preference for dated words like “shanty” and “palanquin.” But it’s mostly the result of Meloy’s nasal, thin and remote voice that always sound as if he’s singing to us from deep in the past.
Earlier this year, the Decemberists released their sixth studio album The King Is Dead. And they’re already back with a follow-up EP aptly titled Long Live The King. Though it’s composed of six songs that didn’t make it onto The King Is Dead, that doesn’t mean they’re throwaways; the 10-song album was so compact that its trimmed fat could have easily been left on it.
(MORE: The All-TIME 100 Songs)
Long Live opens with “E. Watson,” a tale about the nefarious late-19th century Florida sugar cane plantation owner Edgar Watson, who often and openly settled his personal problems with murder and was killed by a group of men who, as the Decemberists put it, “buried him all face down to get [him] into hell.” The tune’s quiet, unadorned acoustic guitar fades as Meloy’s tells Watson’s story and picks up again when the killing is done. Both it and the equally morose “Burying Davy” are intentionally vintage, but too clean to actually possess any patina.
With jams, harmonicas and one Grateful Dead cover, the rest of the EP veers into Americana territory. “Row Jimmy” originally appeared on the Dead’s 1973 album Wake of the Flood; the song’s slow, jam-band vibe is the group’s attempt at loosening up, a collective letting down of its hair.
There is one outlier; the abbreviated, text message title of the uptempo country love song “I4U & U4Me” looks out of place on a record whose other songs make reference to things like “the war between the States.” It’s the only track on Long Live to make a blatantly contemporary reference—to “bums outside the Circle K.” When I first heard that line, I actually had to play the track again; it didn’t feel right for Meloy to sing of something so modern.
When The King is Dead came out in January, its country-tinged songs (helped by guest star Gillian Welch’s perfect backing vocals) were looser and less contextually defined than anything the band had written before. Long Live the King is an extension of that. Yes, Meloy and his crew are still spinning yarns set in long-forgotten times, but they’ve added lighter, more accessible tracks that help us figure out how we feel today. At its heart, “I4U & U4Me” is a love song about two screw ups who were meant for each other, while “Foregone,” a twangy country tune very much inspired by The Band, deals with the inevitable path one takes in life. Maybe that’s why The King is Dead was the group’s first album to top the Billboard charts; if you want to appeal to the masses, you’re going to have to replace your tales of murderous plantation owners with something people actually can relate to.
It’ll be interesting to see what’s next for the Decemberists. They’re inching ever closer to the mainstream, but their interests have fluctuated wildly over the years—their 2009 album The Hazards of Love was an ornate concept album inspired by a British folk singer Anne Briggs’ similarly titled 1966 EP and 2006’s The Crane Wife was largely inspired by a Japanese folktale and Shakespeare’s The Tempest. And in interviews, they still seem self-conscious about how and when they might accidentally sell out. Will their next album be played in television commercials and sold at Starbucks, or will they do something drastic like write a rock opera about the invention of the steam engine? At this point, Meloy and Co. could go either way.
(MORE: Flip through all of TIME’S Pop Culture lists on our new iPad app)