I'll Be Your Girl

The album magnifies both Meloy’s core songwriting and the group’s gifts for bold ambitious arrangements. This brings out some dynamic juxtapositions between simplicity and elaboration that serve proceedings in a refreshing fashion.

It shows a refreshed band, back on the chase to find new ways of songwriting, with strong melodies and intriguing lyrics remaining a constant. I’ll Be Your Girl is the start of this new chapter, and it’s a wonderful place for them to begin again.

Girl or boy, The Decemberists have been there to drape a drunken arm around in the absence of fortune for the best part of 15 years now. The good news is, the tone in that arm is firmly set again. A genuine and welcome joy.

The Decemberists' ace and absorbing eighth album is rather more traditionalist than they're letting on. [Apr 2018, p.88]

While they haven't lost their taste for repointing American and European folk, there's a brash, stadium-rock dazzle to these songs, proving that The Decemberists, at least, aren't taking the awfulness lying down. [Apr 2018, p.108]

The results are mostly successful; occasionally a strange sound seems shoehorned into a perfectly good Decemberists song.

I'll Be Your Girl may not be an unquestionable expression of their glam rock influences or even be their best work, but it's nice to see The Decemberists have stepped outside their comfort zone and reached back a bit to reconnect with their daring and adventurous ways without losing their distinctive charm.

While Meloy's lyrics are sharply honed and evocative, it's this cavalcade of sounds that not only makes I'll Be Your Girl compelling, but distinctive among Decemberists albums.

Despite also cooking up a glam stomp with "We All Die Young," it sometimes feels overly contrived. The epic "Rusalka, Rusalka/The Wild Rushes" is a notable exception. [Apr 2018, p.26]

I’ll Be Your Girl is a welcome sign of a veteran band eager to experiment, but it’s also the first Decemberists album where the sounds are more interesting than the songs.

Though it contains a number of experiments that don’t quite work, I’ll Be Your Girl offers tracks that point to a very exciting way forward for the band.

They’re still making some alluring music, yet their albums have never sounded more disjointed.

What it's missing is haunting songs--calamity songs, the kind of songs that used to proliferate on Decemberists albums like soot-smudged Victorian orphans. [No. 150, p.49]

On I’ll Be Your Girl, The Decemberists do a few things well, a few things poorly, and most of them acceptably and nothing more. The fact that it never goes completely off the rails is almost as disappointing as the fact that it never finds its footing or seems interested in doing so.

The Decemberists do a very particular thing – darkly ornate, literary-minded, self-consciously verbose Anglophile prog-folk-rock--exceedingly well, so well that you can't blame 'em for wanting to do something else. They do just that on I'll Be Your Girl, at least in parts, the upshot being, well, a re-affirmation of that particular thing they do exceedingly well.

It makes for some intriguing collisions of ancient and modern.

I'll Be Your Girl would stand as a fine but forgettable work on its own, yet when compared to the pedigree of its predecessors, it's quite disappointing in every way.

While half of the tracks here would make for decent singles, the hodgepodge of styles ultimately results in an unbalanced and disjointed album.

It falls into a very similar trap to the band’s last album, which started with a track that sounded promisingly fresh (“The Singer Addresses His Audience”) before immediately lapsing into Decemberists-by-numbers (“Cavalry Captain”).

The album is at its best when it explores glam influences: the campness and flamboyance nicely mirror the theatrical nature of The Decemberists’ established repertoire. But they would do well to learn that sticking some synthesiser parts behind a guitar band doesn’t automatically make them New Order.