There are essentially two volumes to The Decemberists’ on-going story. The first extends from the band’s inception up through The Hazards of Love, an era of concept records characterized by depressed balladry in 10-minute-plus runtimes and instrumentals. In stark contrast, the second volume starts sometime in the 2010s, when Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy largely abandoned excessive instrumentation in exchange for swifter satisfaction. This was spearheaded by the rootsy The King Is Dead, a Billboard chart-topper and the most commercially successful Decemberists record to date. On their seventh long player, What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World (Capitol), the Portland troupe fleshes out this new style and emphasizes the folk of this exploration of the indie-folk tradition. But it’s questionable whether that was for the best.

The newer fraction of The Decemberists’ songbook seems regressive in its compositional concision. This can be attributed to a shift in focal point; What a Terrible World’s songs inhabit a space of deep introspection and personal experience as opposed to the referential bard’s tales of the past. In just scraping the surface, we have a documentation of teen aspiration “to see a naked girl” on “Philomena,” and for parents, the sarcastic, pub chant of “Better Not Wake the Baby.” Other songs can be viewed on a grander scale. “12/17/12,” a song written about the Sandy Hook shootings, sees Meloy lamenting the atrocity while acknowledging the beauty in his own world, while album closer “A Beginning Song” is an anthemic, heard-it-before piece of brighter days ahead optimism.

Thanks to Meloy’s unrelenting eloquence and superciliousness, The Decemberists will always be recognizable. However, when it comes to The Decemberists 2.0 making album takeaways, What a Terrible World’s catchiest cuts (namely “The Wrong Year” and lead single “Make You Better”) are relatively unimpressive and unintriguing. Save the low, tender timbre and guitar progression of “Make You Better,” What a Terrible World’s songs as a whole are hardly progressive. This could be because they are not crafted in the lens of an overarching concept (e.g. The Crane Wife’s “O Valencia” or Picaresque’s “16 Military Wives”), or maybe it’s the lack of that pre-2009 baroque sensibility. Regardless, it seems as The Decemberists have aged with their songwriting process, they have become less ambitious.

But any criticism, including all given in this review, is arguably sideswiped by the surprisingly seamless album-opener “The Singer Addresses His Audience,” where Meloy acknowledges their stylistic shift: “We know you threw your around us, in the hopes we wouldn’t change. But we had to change some, you know, to belong to you.” Obviously, The Decemberists are cognizant of their repertoire’s dichotomy just as this critic is, and Meloy doesn’t attempt to make anything more of What a Terrible World than what it is. They belong to us, and perhaps what might appear to be uninspired music is in fact just The Decemberists trying to live on, for better or for worse.