Decemberists/ Lavender Diamond - Glasgow ABC

If Decemberists were soldiers, they’d be the infantry. A dexterous troop of classic pop combatants, the Portland, Oregon indie-rock conquerors amass an artillery of violins, keyboards, guitars, squeezeboxes, drums and double bass on a Glasgow stage – and then they slay us.
They advance in ludicrously tight formation: white clad top brass Colin Molloy strides into view; starts battering a vast white mandolin – like David Byrne doing ‘Psycho Killer’ on Stop Making Sense, as envisaged by bookworms – on storming exordium ‘The Crane Wife Pt 3’.
His surrounding, well-armed, consummate foot mob helms a victorious aural assault, under a canvas of primary lighting, over a canon of erudite skewed-pop: ‘Sixteen Military Wives’, ‘We Both Go Down Together’, and ‘Yankee Bayonet’ among its livid, colour-flushed munitions.

If Decemberists were travellers, they would be spacemen: their latest enterprise, The Crane Wife asserts their clamour as fearless, woozy, prog-rock voyagers. Live, their mercurial arias conjure neon asteroids, comets, laser beams: not least on ‘The Island: Come And See’ (and the subsequent freak-outs in its three-part suite); and on the pop-rocketeers’ lambent, light-saber anthem, ‘Odalisque’.
They bid all to join their meteoric crew, flanked by auxiliary aeronauts Lavender Diamond: a harmonious, soaring LA contingent, fronted by singer and superstar-in-waiting Becky Stark, whose stadium flourishes and grandiose antics beckon a bigger stage; Hollywood; Oscars. Possessed of a luminous, clarion larynx – and an exuberant line in fanatical handclaps – Stark’s trilling cantatas and down-home floral-pop are augmented by a bounding gaggle of instrumental misfits that features a giant, bombastic pianist who’s equal parts Mozart, Rolf from the Muppet Show and Jerry Lee Lewis.

With a debut album forthcoming on Rough Trade, Lavender Diamond – and their effervescent, candy sucking, crystal-warbling Pollyanna – look set to conduct smiles and delight through the year. Next stop: Sunday school. Or Wembley. For now though, they seduce the crowd, then surrender the reins to our swashbuckling headliners.

If Decemberists were horsemen, they would be cowboys: a swaggering hoard of expert aural gunslingers who wrangle indie, metal, country and rock-opera into a lasso whose tussling contents straddle the fireside ranch serenade of ‘The Crane Wife Pts 1 & 2’; the galloping onslaught of ‘The Infanta’; the pasture-pomp of ‘Sons and Daughters’ (which tonight, in a flash of post-modern brilliance, welcomes Glasgow’s own Sons & Daughters on euphoric backing vocals); and the hysterical, cantering climax of ‘Landlord’s Daughter’ – whose apocalyptic rodeo-prog is galvanised by Molloy’s uproarious “Rawhiiiide!” cry.
But Decemberists aren’t soldiers, or spacemen, or horsemen. Decemberists are five men and women. Their art is their planet; their songs are their weapons. And for their humanity, we should be thankful.