The stock vocabulary of rock—verbal as well as musical—has always been too limited and confining for Colin Meloy. And really, why shouldn’t a smart songwriter rhyme falderal and chaparral, or set Irish mythological epics to 18-minute song suites? Cleverness, delivered with a wink to anyone joining in the sesquipedalian hijinks (for true fans, a dictionary is never far), earned the Decemberists the top spot in a 2006 vote by NPR listeners and gave Meloy unusual bragging rights: He’s the tweedy wizard who used a hint of satire to revive the impossibly uncool ogre of Jethro Tull–vintage progressive rock. Somewhere along the way, though, Meloy forgot that the Achilles’ heel of Tull and their pals was taking all those Roman numerals and forest soliloquies waaaay too seriously. With the laborious merger of Japanese folklore and Shakespeare on 2006’s The Crane Wife, Meloy’s wink began turning into a furrow, and cleverness overwhelms the humorless The Hazards of Love, a medieval romance that feels like homework. In some ways, this is the band’s most accomplished album. A carefully and elaborately composed cycle, it weaves twinkling pastoral motifs and thunderous climaxes, recalling metal-folk-Hobbit amalgams like Led Zeppelin’s “The Battle of Evermore.” But Meloy’s love of archaic wordplay degenerates into a distracting tic (“The prettiest whistles won’t wrestle the thistles undone”), and the story line doesn’t justify its treatment in 17 parts: Wee Margaret is raped by a demon disguised as a fawn, then abducted; she’s saved by boyfriend William, but they drown in a river. Along the way, Meloy drops in superfluous references to eighth-century Welsh history and crowing corncrakes.The harpsichord and children’s choir in “The Hazards of Love 3 (Revenge!)” are clichés of British progressive rock. But that’s not what makes the album dull—Meloy, after all, made his name by breathing life into clichés. It’s the hollowness that emerges once you realize that what matters isn’t the story being told, or the feelings expressed, or even the music itself, but rather the glossary. And that’s falderal.

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