YMMV / The Decemberists

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • May or may not actually be accidental, but in "Culling of the Fold": "Get him down on his knees/ With your hands all shakin'/ That'll teach him how to take it"?
  • "You can take him in a stitch, drop his body in a ditch, leave his limbs all naked, that'll teach him how to take it!"
  • Colin has encouraged people to have sex during Rise To Me. Yes, really. Whether he was thinking of this application when he wrote it is... a good question.
    • That whole concert is a good example. "It's very hot! It's a very damp and hot Sasquatch costume."
  A little louder, ladies and gentlemen! Some moaning! Some groaning! You're being swallowed by a whale!
  • And we both had some fun, though I twice bit my tongue and it lasted too long for my taste...
  • John Moen's nicknames (and Colin's tendency to go disregard boundaries◊ I'm the frontman). "Brokeback Moen! Johnny Couch..."
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Many fans state that perhaps the narrator's trapped with the wrong person in "The Mariner's Tale" and doesn't care just as long as he get revenge in some way.
• Awesome Music:
  • "This Is Why We Fight" Just listen But pretty much anything off that album (or any album for that matter).
  • The Tain.
  • "Everything is Awful" is the most cheery song about pessimism you'll ever hear.
• Complete Monster: The Hazards of Love: The Rake, one of the two main villains of this Concept Album, is a self-centered sociopath who only married his wife to slake his want for sex, and believed fatherhood was a curse. Glad about the deaths of his wife and third daughter in childbirth, the Rake decided to murder his remaining children in order to gain the freedom of a new, carefree life. In "The Rake's Song", he reveals he poisoned his elder daughter, drowned the younger, and beat his son to death then burned his body because the boy dared to fight back. Assuring the listener he's never really been bothered about murdering his own kids, in the second half of the album he begins his new life by abducting the heavily pregnant Margaret with the intent to rape her.
• Genius Bonus: So much of it. For instance, only someone who is both a botanist^note Solanum=potatoes, eggplant, tomatoes; Asteraceae=lettuce. Vavilov=Nikolai Vavilov, Russian/Soviet father of modern plant genetics and authority on the domestication of crops, sent to the gulag for holding to "bourgeois"—and true—Mendelian genetics. and a World War II buff would be able to really understand "When the War Came" without being told about it. "Sons and Daughters" references houses of aluminum and eating cinnamon, a pretty bizarre image unless you know that aluminum was once considered a metal more precious than gold, and cinnamon was used as currency.
  • "The Bachelor and the Bride" requires a working knowledge of Dada art, specifically Marcel Duchamp.
• Nightmare Fuel: "Shankill Butchers", "Culling of the Fold", "Odalisque", "The Rake's Song", "The Hazards of Love 3 (Revenge!)", "Leslie Anne Levine", "A Cautionary Song".
• Signature Song: "The Perfect Crime", "The Mariner's Revenge Song", or "This is Why We Fight", with the mainstream seeming to accept "This is Why We Fight" as the winner.
• Squick: Some of the gory bits, especially the rape scenes.
  • The implication that the Chimbley Sweep is still a child during his clearly-sexual encounter with the widow.
  • "They found her in the shower, she'd been gone for seven weeks."
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: One of the reasons why The Hazards of Love was more poorly received than earlier albums; a Rock Opera involving abuction, rape, child murder and other grisly subjects that ends with both halves of the protagonist couple drowning. And the woman is pregnant, to boot.
• The Woobie: Quite a lot of their characters. Poor Eli.