Monqui presents The Decemberists February 19, 2011

With their brand new album, The King is Dead, due in stores Jan 18, The Decemberists return to the road life for a set of shows in Portland and Seattle. Playing both material from The King is Dead and old favorites, Colin Meloy and co will be at the Paramount Theatre in Seattle on February 18 and Portland's Schnitzer Hall on February 19, as part of what's been named "The Popes of Pendarvia World Tour". Mountain Man opens as special guest for this leg of the tour.

When The Decemberists completed their wildly ambitious 2009 The Hazards of Love, frontman Colin Meloy said that "doing this album took a lot out of me, and I'm definitely curious what will come out now that I've gotten it out of my system."

So Meloy headed into the opposite direction, going for more stripped-down, country-based, straightforward, unadorned songs, which, he says can be at least as hard as building complicated musical epics: "For all my talk about how complex those records were, this one may have been harder to do,"

The King is Dead also represents his own musical journey coming full circle. "Over the last eleven years, I feel like I've been mining mostly English traditions for influence", he says. "I've kind of come back to a lot of the more American music that got me going in the first place – R.E.M. and Camper Van Beethoven and all these bands that borrowed from more American traditions like Neil Young and the Byrds."

"Sometimes I kind of miss the epic-ness of the other albums," he continues, "but it's nice to get all of the information across in three minutes. It's like going from reading a novel to reading a bunch of short stories."

Sat, Feb 19th:
Time: 8 p.m.

Official Website: http://www.pcpa.com/events/event.php?event=5790