Concertwire.com

Among many other things, the Decemberists' songwriter and frontman Colin Meloy is pop's King of Anapests. His band's records (three albums so far, as well as a couple of EPs) are littered with resonant, vaguely archaic three-syllable words: "maidenhead," "camisole," "priory," "vagabond," "architect," "lioness" and, of course, the title of their remarkable new Picaresque. As that vocabulary suggests, the Decemberists play the role of theatrical, 19th century-obsessed, tongue-deep-in-cheek litterateurs to the hilt, dedicating a song to novelist Myla Goldberg (on 2003's Her Majesty the Decemberists) and anchoring the boldly orchestrated Picaresque with a nine-minute epic called "The Mariner's Revenge Song," in which a young tar avenges his mother's stained honor while in the belly of a giant whale. But they're also a swaggeringly fine rock band — Meloy recently published a book about the impact the Replacements' Let It Be had on him as a teenager — and the band's reputation is blooming and buzzing beyond the indie circuit.