[photos by Greg Cristman – original set at brooklynvegan]

The last time we checked in with The Decemberists, their album The King Is Dead reached number one on the Billboard album chart. On that January night nearly five years ago, we recorded their sold out show at Beacon Theatre and it seemed like there were no heights that the band would not reach. But in May of 2011 keyboardist Jen Conlee was diagnosed with cancer and at the end of the 2011 tour the band announced a hiatus. Skip ahead four years and with Conlee thankfully in remission, the band returned with several shows in 2014 and ultimately 2015 saw the return of the Decemberists to active recording and touring. The new album What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World was released in January and the band has been touring heavily ever since. Indeed, later this month the Decemberists will offer another 2015 release, the EP Florasongs. Our chance to catch the band this time around was a late-announce show at the wonderful Capital Theatre in Port Chester.

I’ll admit to having cheated and checked out the Decemberists tour setlists at the band’s fan forum. Its a bit surprising that the set does not include more than a few Beautiful World songs, and the absence of my favorite track from the album (“The Lake Song”) was a bit of a letdown for me (and then they played it the following night at Radio City!). Overall though, this was an extremely fair representation of the band’s career thus far. Colin Meloy has been starting each show solo, and on this night it was “Crane Wife 3”, before the band joins mid-song. The first half of the show was a nice run through various tracks (including new-ish single “Make You Better” that we are streaming below) before the real fun began with the threesome of “July July!”, “O Valencia!” and “Chimbley Sweep”, the latter of which included the traditional instrument swap, fan interaction and general craziness. For the encore segment, any “missed” songs were forgotten as the Decemberists performed a monumental medley that featured a good chunk (almost 25 minutes worth) of 2009’s The Hazards of Love (a tour we also recorded). This first encore was undoubtedly my own personal highlight of the evening, and we are streaming the mini-set’s (and the album’s) concluding song “The Hazards of Love 4”. A second call for encores yielded a duet of numbers before the night closed with a nearly two hour show.

The Decemberists tour continues with a handful of Midwest dates before the US leg completes with an appearance at the ACL Fest in Austin, all dates here.

I recorded this set with the Schoeps cards mounted on a twelve-foot stand inside of the front right of the soundboard cage. The centered location and the superb sound in the venue yielded an excellent recording marred only slightly by some drunks in front of the board cage who were so bad that they were later removed by security. With that caveat, enjoy!

This Recording is now available to Download in MP or FLAC and to Stream at Archive.org [HERE]

Stream “Make You Better”:

Stream “The Hazards of Love 4”:

Note: All of the material on this site is offered with artist permission, free to fans, at our expense. The only thing we ask is that you download the material directly from this site, rather than re-posting the direct links or the files on other sites without our permission. Please respect our request, and feel free to repost the Soundcloud links.

The Decemberists
2015-09-24
Capitol Theatre
Port Chester NY

Digital Master Recording
FOB Audience

Schoeps CCM4u Cardioids > Sound Devices 744t > 24bit 48kHz wav > Soundforge (post-production) > CDWave 1.95 (tracking) > TLH > flac (320 MP3 and tagging via Foobar)

Recorded and Produced by nyctaper

Setlist:
[Total Time 1:51:06]
01 [introduction]
02 The Crane Wife 3
03 Leslie Anne Levine
04 [banter – Motofix]
05 Down by the Water
06 [banter – mining]
07 Rox in the Box
08 Philomena
09 The Wrong Year
10 [banter – aristocracy]
11 On the Bus Mall
12 Why Would I Now
13 Make You Better
14 [banter – Phish shows]
15 Carolina Low
16 July July
17 [banter – new intro]
18 O Valencia
19 [banter – Grateful Dead teases]
20 The Chimbley Sweep
21 Fits and Starts
22 [encore break]
23 Prelude
24 The Hazards of Love 1
25 A Bower Scene
26 Won’t Want for Love
27 The Rake’s Song
28 The Hazards of Love 4
29 [second encore break]
30 Of Angels and Angles
31 [band introductions]
32 Dear Avery

If you download this recording from NYCTaper, we expect that you will PLEASE SUPPORT The Decemberists, visit their website, and purchase the new album What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World and/or Preorder their forthcoming EP Florasongs from the link at the main page of their website or at the Decemberists Shop [HERE].