Here’s what you need to know about The Decemberists playing The Hazards of Love in its entirety on their current tour: on prog-rock bulletin boards, folks are comparing this show to Genesis performing The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway in the 1970s.

Hazards of Love sounds awfully proggy on record, and live it’s got all the telltale signs: a theatrical presentation (including costumes of sorts), a ridiculously fantastical concept/storyline, lots of Hammond organ and other keys, a gratuitously long children’s choir section… everything to make the latent prog fan inside you start drooling. And the thing is, it works. Before last night I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the album, but its highlights are exhilirating in the live setting, especially those featuring the powerhouse vocals of My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden. Set the absurd concept aside and the music stands on its own remarkably well.

More photos and thoughts after the jump. Full gallery here.

Colin Meloy and company were on last night, blazing through the Hazards of Love material and then playing a short second set that drew at least one song from each of the band’s full-length albums, plus a couple surprises (including a cover of Heart’s “Crazy On You” that was basically an excuse for the band’s two guest female vocalists to wail). The selection tended to the mellow—for instance “Red Right Ankle,” “Engine Driver,” and the gorgeous, moving encore of “Sons and Daughters.” For this last, Meloy mentioned that the band had made a side trip to tour the White House, and in the spirit of what they felt during that visit, he had the audience join him for the song’s ecstatic refrain, “Hear all the bombs fade away.” It was probably the only song more perfect for an encore closer than “The Mariner’s Revenge Song.”

I saw the Decemberists’ show in Richmond last Friday as well, and came away from that one less than satisfied – the band fucked around too much, making jokes to the point that it killed the flow of the concert and hurt the actual performances of the songs. At Merriweather, thanks to a strict time limit on their set, the band were forced to tighten things up a bit, which had a hugely positive effect on their show. After all, prog-rock might revel in its excess, but it’s always best with at least a hint of moderation.

Robyn Hitchcock and Andrew Bird opened. Merriweather isn’t the easiest place to get to from D.C., so I missed Hitchcock’s set, but Bird’s performance was predictably great and photos of it are included in the full gallery. A teaser:

The Decemberists’ new folk-rock opera, The Hazards of Love, traces a well-worn arc: Boy meets girl, boy falls for girl, boy loses girl to spawnicidal rake, rake is besieged by ghosts of his murdered children, boy gets girl back, boy and girl drown in turbulent metaphorical river.

Like we’ve never heard that one before.

For the eccentric Portland quintet, an opera was an inevitable turn, since it’s the ideal vehicle for songwriter Colin Meloy’s elaborate lyrical constructions. Meloy—a bookish esotericist who tends to dress the part of a door-to-door Bible salesman—has exhibited a knack for narrative songwriting throughout the Decemberists’ career, from the quirky character sketches in Her Majesty the Decemberists and Picaresque to the suites of the band’s last album, The Crane Wife. While The Decemberists’ first attempt at this sort of project—an 18-minute EP called The Tain—was a mediocre effort, the their musical style fits the form. In the context of an album-length song cycle, Meloy’s language, which tends toward the obscure and archaic, sounds less stilted.

The Hazards of Love places us in a medieval mythscape where corncrakes crow in lieu of roosters, disapproving sisters dis each other’s beaus as “irascible blackguards,” and it’s not unusual for maidens a-wandering in the taiga to be impregnated by shapeshifting forest-children. So it is with Margaret, the album’s embattled heroine, who finds her own belly big with child courtesy of a sympathetic he-nymph named William. Overtaken by idealistic love, the two embark on a doomed romance beset by a jealous mother and a wanton rapist.

There’s something distinctly Candide in the young lovers’ maudlin naïveté and the bittersweet way they turn out. Meloy establishes his pessimism in the first iteration of the album’s title track: “Oh, the hazards of love / You’ll learn soon enough / The prettiest whistles won’t wrestle the thistles undone.” The “hazards of love,” outlined thereafter, are legion: jealousy, ambivalence, lust, vengeance, and self-destruction, to name a few.

The album features some of the grungiest, guitar-thick arrangements the band has produced to date. The harpsichords, organs, and accordions are still there, though, along with Meloy’s distinctive, nasal melodies. And while the characters are by no means the most interesting ones Meloy has ever created, The Hazards of Love has enough dark, playful energy to be compelling anyway.

Carlin’s words came back into my mind while watching Heartless Bastards perform at Stubbs Bar-B-Que. Surely this was a situation that he would have appreciated, an all-white blues band chugging away beneath the looming visage of a scowling black man.

But while this scene had some serious Blues Hammer-elements going on, I’m not sure I completely believe Carlin. Heartless Bastards was pretty good. Erika Wennerstrom had an appropriately leathery voice, and they played a heavier and moodier set than I would have expected from a band sitting on a bill with the Decemberists.