the decemberists hazards of love full download free hazards of love full album download free. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 66aafbac0e200c42 • Your IP : 188.246.226.140 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Decemberists offer free song download as album preview. In advance of their fifth full-length, , due out March 24, Portland art-rock band The Decemberists is offering a free download of one of the album's tracks, "A Rake's Song." Or at least they're trying to; their website, decemberists.com , currently seems to be choking under the load, with the "sign up for this download" form and the front page only working sporadically. Here's a sneak preview of the sneak preview: "The Rake's Song," a typically grim, catchy Decemberists chant-along about a selfish man who guiltlessly murders his children, is likely the best track to ease fans from the relative simplicity of the group's last album, , into the heavily stylized new album, which is being billed as a , and is much more heavily produced and layered than past Decemberists . It's also meant as a complete, 17-track novelistic story, though sometimes the narrative line gets a little obscure. From the press release: The album began when Meloy – long fascinated by the British folk revival of the 1960s – found a copy of revered vocalist ’s 1966 EP, titled The Hazards of Love . Since there was actually no song with the album’s title, he set out to write one. Soon he was immersed in something much larger than just a new composition. The Hazards Of Love tells the tale of a woman named Margaret who is ravaged by a shape- shifting animal; her lover, William; a forest queen; and a cold-blooded, lascivious rake… 's and 's Shara Worden deliver the lead vocals for the female characters, while 's , and ' Rebecca Gates appear in supporting roles. The range of sounds reflects the characters’ arcs, from the ’s singsong lilt in “Isn’t it a Lovely Night?” to the heavy metal thunder of “The Queen’s Rebuke/The Crossing.” “There’s an odd bond between the music of the British folk revival and classic metal,” says Meloy . “A natural connection between, like, and Black Sabbath – of course, Sandy Denny from Fairport even sang with on ‘The Battle of Evermore.’ I think there’s a shared sense of narrative and ambience, of moving beyond the first person in your writing. And I thought it would be interesting to mess around with that.” And mess with it they do, usually much more heavily than on "A Rake's Song," though its screaming "Brick In The Wall"-style children's chorus and pounding percussion makes for a solid gateway into the rest of the album. The Decemberists intend to tour this spring, playing the entire album in order as the first half of their concerts, then dipping into older material for the second half. The Hazards of Love. Purchase and download this album in a wide variety of formats depending on your needs. Buy the album Starting at £12.49. King Decemberist 's love for the heydays of British folk-rock has always served as the foundation on which he builds his crafty, idiosyncratic , but on Hazards of Love he's taken that bedrock and built his own version of Stonehenge. A 17-song suite (think one continuous song with track ID's peppered throughout for sanity's sake) about a girl named Margaret, shapeshifters, forest queens, and fairytale treachery, Hazards of Love is ambitious, pretentious, obtuse, often impenetrable, and altogether pretty great. Harking back to the late-'60s/early- '70s offerings from bands like Pentangle, Horslips, ELP, Steeleye Span, and the Incredible String Band, it makes no apologies for its nerdy, prog rock musicality, and convoluted narrative. Meloy, who often cites , , and Anne Briggs as influences -- Hazards is named after a Briggs' EP which featured no such song -- must have had a vast hard rock/power metal collection to draw from as well, as one can glean melodic cues and structures from Iron Maiden and Rush as easily as they can Fairport Convention and Jethro Tull. On a record with no obvious single (the first instance of the title track comes the closest), it's the album as a whole that needs to engage, and for the most part, the Decemberists have succeeded. The inclusion of guest vocalists Becky Stark (Lavender Diamond) and Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond), who bring some Little Queen-era Heart to the table, as well as bit parts from Jim James (My Morning Jacket), Rebecca Gates (Spinanes), and Robyn Hitchcock help keep the focus off Meloy's affected vocals, but it's the music that drives this beast into the forest. Producer has beefed up the band's sound even more than he did with Christopher Walla on 2006's Crane Wife, channeling more reverb into the acoustics and a whole lot more brimstone into the electrics, resulting in what is easily the band's best sounding record to date. Hazards of Love won't convert anybody who already wrote the band off as overly precious bookworms with a /Victorian ghost story fetish, but fans who have dutifully followed the Decemberists since their 2002 debut get to take home bragging rights this time around. © James Christopher Monger /TiVo. The Hazards of Love. The Hazards of Love, released March 24, 2009, is the fifth album by The Decemberists. The album was inspired by an Anne Briggs EP titled The Hazards of Love. According to the band, frontman Colin Meloy set out to write a song with the album's title—eventually leading to an album in itself. Becky Stark (of Lavender Diamond) and Shara Worden (of My Brightest Diamond) provide guest vocals throughout the album. The Hazards of Love centers around a love story, similar to the use of recurring stories in The Crane Wife: a woman named Margaret (voiced by Stark) falls in love with a shape-shifting forest dweller (voiced by Meloy). A jealous forest queen (voiced by Worden) and an ensemble of recurring characters bring conflict to the album's story arc. On January 15, 2009, "The Rake's Song" became available as a free download on their Myspace page. This was followed on February 16, 2009 by "The Hazards of Love 1," again on Myspace. On March 13, 2009, The Decemberists announced that the album would be released on iTunes on March 17, 2009. The album was released on iTunes Australia on March 14, 2009. On March 20, 2009, Entertainment Weekly began streaming the full album on imeem. The Hazards of Love. Always defined by their eccentricities, the Decemberists offer a tangled narrative set to thick stoner-metal sludge and prog-folk arpeggios. Nobody got into the Decemberists for the riffs. In other ways, though, the theatrical Portland folk-rockers' noble sojourn into heavy narrative prog-folk was probably always in the stars. Ornately antiquarian diction was their Ziggy Stardust . Ginormous song suites based on world folklore were their deaf, dumb, and blind kid. Yes, they were meant for The Wall . In an interview with Paste , singing guitarist/songwriter Colin Meloy mentioned that The Hazards of Love was "initially conceived as a musical. but I decided about halfway through my time in France that it wasn't going to work as a stage piece. But it would still work as a rock record, so that's where it ended up." Alas, for all the derring-do of the Decemberists' resolutely un-sold-out (I guess?) fifth album, its failures as a stage piece may explain some of the problems that hamper it as a rock record. It makes sense that the Decemberists would end up here. A willingness to make their fans put in some work, whether with fancy language or sprawling song suites, has been part of their steez ever since the baroque reveries of 2002 debut and stagey bookishness of 2003 breakthrough Her Majesty -- both of which still kick pantaloon. After 2004's The Tain EP flashed the first signs of metalhead envy, Picaresque a year later ended the Decemberists' indie years with their most relatable and poppiest album (still my favorite of theirs). Capitol debut The Crane Wife showed no symptoms of what Meloy had termed "major-label sellout-itis". The Hazards of Love , inspired by UK folkie Anne Briggs' 1966 EP of the same name, has thick stoner-metal sludge and peat-bogged prog-folk arpeggios. Tucker Martine, who mixed The Crane Wife , produces exactly right for the material, focusing on the songs. Multi-instrumentalist and bassist add several string arrangements. Robyn Hitchcock adds subtle electric textures on an instrumental interlude, and My Morning Jacket's Jim James and the Spinanes' Rebecca Gates are in there somewhere, too. Still, although the album's grandiose narrative about star-crossed lovers William and Margaret-- and the dastardly villains who beset them-- has some nice twists, it's not exactly Andrew Lloyd Webber. Usually here's where I'm supposed to say, "That's OK, you don't have to follow the plot, because the songs stand on their own"-- except, with a few exceptions, they don't, not quite. It doesn't simplify things that Meloy sings the parts of multiple characters, also including "First Voice" and "The Rake". The blessedly thorough lyric sheet makes advance mp3s like dark infanticide memoir "The Rake's Song" a lot funnier, full of witty wordplay ("I was wedded and it whetted my thirst") and sly foreshadowing ("You think that I would be haunted"-- he will be), but reading isn't the same as listening. Too much work, not enough payoff. (Hmm, imagine that .) Not that the Decemberists' latest has anywhere near the smugness that haters might wrongly expect-- they sang " One/Youth and Beauty Brigade", calling "all bed wetters", after all. "The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid", in which Meloy's William argues against the Queen to set him free to be with his beloved, has blazing classic-rock riffs and a commanding vocal by My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden. (The reprise is less essential, unless you're still following the plot.) Worden returns on the "The Queen's Rebuke/The Crossing", which has blistering dynamic shifts, an organ solo, and plenty of lurching Black Mountain heaviness. Surprisingly, it all sounds like the Decemberists, at least if you've been paying attention over the years. For the love songs, then, The Hazards of Love puts on some Nashville twang. Pedal steel cries alongside swaying accordion on "Isn't it a Lovely Night?", with a precious post-orgasm (post-Pete & the Pirates?) pun. As the pregnant Margaret, Lavender Diamond's Becky Stark is a welcome pairing for Meloy, smiling with Princess Bride -like serenity through her worries on "Won't Want for Love (Margaret in the Taiga)"; Meloy's voice is at its vulnerable best on the trembling meadow-makeout ballad "The Hazards of Love 2 (Wager All)". I can take the undead children chanting on "The Hazards of Love 3 (Revenge!)", but not the watery wedding vows on the drunken finale-- what can I say, I really, really didn't like Titanic . Enough happens musically on The Hazards of Love that I can still see it being fun for fans in a live setting, especially if you know the lyrics. On disc, though, it's largely missing the catchy choruses and verisimilar emotions that previously served as ballast for the Decemberists' gaudy eccentricities. As a turn toward metal, The Tain EP's smaller portion was more satisfying-- although, as mid-career change-ups go, this is still a fair piece more enjoyable than something like MMJ's Evil Urges . "Doing The Hazards of Love took a lot out of me," Meloy confides in the press bio. "And I'm definitely curious what will come out now that I've got this out of my system." The Decemberists already released three non-album singles last year, compiled as the Always the Bridesmaid EP; "Sleepless", a lovely orchestral lullaby from the recent Dark Was the Night charity compilation, suggests the Decemberists still have plenty more nautical epics to perform. "I've got nothing to hold onto," Meloy sings. A friend of Bobby McGee's once called that feeling freedom, and it only took a four-and-a-half-minute song.