The/5 Songs

5 Songs is the essential springtime mix. Dispensing with the occasional delightfully macabre narratives of Castaways and Cutouts, 5 Songs collects the feel good'ns. The centerpiece may be Colin Meloy's tallest tale set to music yet: "My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist" is a fantastic autobiography with the kind of detail and flight of fancy that you would expect from film director Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums). The songs are bright, buoyant, and devastatingly pop. As interpreted by Meloy and Co., The Tain is a single eighteen-minute song composed of five movements. The Decemberists tell an abstract, impressionist version of The Tain's events: a tale of bad people doing bad things, flawed heroes, blood, guts, war, adultery, cattle--all of the things that would corrupt today's youth if they heard word of it.