Been listening to The Decemberists' new album, "The Hazards of Love," over the last couple of days.

Really interesting effort, and kind of a lovely concept. The band ended up writing a fairy tale - a real fairy tale, with edge and love and magic and horror and tragedy, all set to music. With a ton of hooks that pull you into repeat listening. It's one of those albums that may hit you funny the first time, but pulls you back to listen again, and becomes more rewarding each time.

The music in this album isn't like most concept albums. Rather than the usual concept album approach of songs and music as primary, with a story to try and tie that together, the story is prime and the music is subordinated. Its tone, underlying styles, and influences are all very much dictated by the point you're at in the story. They threw everything they had at that, from the quasi-medieval folk base to medieval, choir, hard rock, and multiple points in between, in order to get the emotional pitches they wanted. Some choices were pretty ballsy, starting with the opening Prelude and extending to the Faerie Queen's compelling, razor-edged sequences. The result is more "opera" than "rock," but to me it's faithful to the story they set out to tell. And very interesting.

So, is there a happy ending? Maybe it depends on your definition of "happy"...