Something pretty special will be happening in Royce Hall on Monday evening, courtesy of indie rock darlings The Decemberists and five young filmmakers.
The band will play its latest album straight through, flanked by accompanying animations in a presentation called “Here Come the Waves: The Hazards of Love Visualized.”
“This is a one-of-a-kind performance, the sort of dream project you wish would happen more often,” said Jonathan Wells, the project’s creative director and founder of an organization called Flux, which is producing the concert. “We were looking for someplace special that the band never played ““ Royce Hall is a beautiful venue and it just felt right for this unique event.”
“The Hazards of Love” is a concept album about the dark side of romantic and sexual entanglements, covering everything from youthful infatuation to rape. With lines like “I was wedded and it whetted my thirst / Until her womb started spilling out babies / Only then did I reckon my curse,” and lots of talk about woods and rivers, the story is reminiscent of a Thomas Hardy novel.
Colin Meloy, The Decemberists’ lead singer and songwriter, is known for crafting dense literary lyrics that read like they were written in England in the 1800s. The antique mystique is often reinforced by album art, which is drawn by Meloy”˜s wife, but the band wanted “Here Come the Waves” to be a departure from that Victorian style.
“They said, “˜We don’t want anything that is too lyrical ““ no lady on a horse.’ They wanted something a little more psychedelic; they wanted our impressions,” filmmaker Guilherme Marcondes said. Wells knew Marcondes would handle the material artfully.
“When the band told me they wanted animation that looked timeless, I immediately thought of him,” Wells said of the award-winning Brazilian-born director. Already a Decemberists fan, Marcondes jumped on the project.
“Having seen their concerts live before, I was always thinking that their music is so visual, it’s naturally theatrical; the images are very strong,” Marcondes said. “So it’s just a perfect marriage.”
They brought on directors Peter Sluszka, Julia Pott, David Hill and Josh Goodrich. Each picked one of the four sides of the vinyl album to animate.
“Since the overall theme had to do with the forest and there were four parts, (Marcondes) suggested we assign each filmmaker a season to provide a mechanism that could tie the four pieces together,” Wells said.
Sluszka animated the first three songs using live-action footage shot at high speed. He said his primary concern was “the creation of a world,” which he describes as having an archetypal folklore-ish sensibility with supernatural happenings in a mysterious forest.
A British director, Pott also focused on the environment for her section, the story’s “summer.” It opens peacefully with “The Hazards of Love 2 (Wager All),” which is about lovers lying in the grass. She used the lyrics’ imagery to illustrate the mood of the music. There’s a shot of the constellations as the lyrics read, “The stars a roof above our heads,” and a scene of animals dancing to the light of the fireflies accompanying the line, “Fireflies providing us their holy light.” Then the tone becomes more sinister, which she depicts by using images like an Native American shooting arrows, a dying bear, a capsized ship and houses demolished by a storm.
Marcondes took the third segment of the album, which is darkest plot-wise, but he stayed away from being too literal. Instead, he created a backdrop that evokes the forest in which the story takes place.
“The basic metaphor is a set design,” Marcondes said. “So I want it to look like they’re playing inside that world of animation. The music is very explosive, so I just tried to make visuals that would go along with it.”
Hill and Goodrich, who collaborate under the moniker Santa Maria, had a similarly visceral approach. The filmmakers spent a night in the woods in New Hampshire with a camera, a big light, a fog machine and a generator. Then they layered graphics over the footage to give the piece structure.
“We thought the trees and the fog would give that eerie feel, but then when we put the more colorful elements on top of it we wanted to strike the balance of more eerie and more melancholy,” Hill said.
The immense thought and feeling that has gone into this collaboration forebodes a deep impact on Monday’s concertgoers.
“Here Comes the Waves feels really unique, it is not a string of music videos,” Wells said. “The band and everybody working on the project was pretty floored with what the filmmakers came up with. I have a feeling that it will heighten the emotional impact of the band’s music.