The Decemberists' Picaresque is a whole stage show in eleven songs

Some records you just listen to. 'Picaresque' you sort of attend. The cover shows The Decemberists in costume on a hand-drawn stage, one of them dressed as a tree, and that's exactly the right first impression. A picaresque is an old style of story about a roguish hero getting by on his wits in a crooked world, and this 2005 album is eleven of those stories, told by a band that clearly loved putting on a show.

The Decemberists came together in Portland, Oregon, in 2000, after Colin Meloy left his Montana band Tarkio and moved west. He found Nate Query on bass, Jenny Conlee on keyboards and accordion, and Chris Funk, who started out as a fan and ended up as the band's secret weapon on guitar, pedal steel and just about anything else with strings. Rachel Blumberg was on drums. After 'Castaways and Cutouts,' 'Her Majesty the Decemberists' and the 18-minute 'The Tain,' 'Picaresque' was their third full album and their last for Kill Rock Stars.

They made it in a church. In the summer of 2004 the band rented an old church in northeast Portland for a month, and you can hear the room on this record. Chris Walla of Death Cab for Cutie produced it, and to keep from getting stuck the band reportedly filled a used bike helmet with slips of paper full of ideas and pulled one out whenever they needed a push. On top of the guitars, bass and drums you get accordion, a hurdy-gurdy, horns, Petra Haden's violin and a lot of big, warm room sound. It came out in March 2005.

It opens like a parade. 'The Infanta' is a royal procession with a Spanish princess, pounding drums and a cast of thousands, and it sets the tone right away: this is going to be big. Then 'We Both Go Down Together' brings in the strings for a pair of lovers from opposite sides of town who are not headed for a happy ending. 'Eli, The Barrowboy' is a sad little ghost of a folk song, and 'The Sporting Life' bounces along while its narrator lies in the dirt after losing the big game and watches his girl leave with the captain of the other team. It's funny and heartbreaking at the same time, which is pretty much this band's specialty.

The middle of the record is where the storytelling really stretches out. 'The Bagman's Gambit' is a seven-minute Cold War spy romance that builds from a whisper to a full-on blowout, and 'From My Own True Love (Lost At Sea)' is a quiet, aching song from someone left behind on the shore. Meloy loves old words and old settings, and on these two songs he makes them feel personal instead of like a history lesson.

Then there's '16 Military Wives,' the closest thing the record has to a hit and the one track that isn't set a few hundred years ago. Meloy wrote it as a protest song in the middle of the Iraq War, and it takes aim less at the soldiers than at the way the news and celebrity culture covered it all. The horns are bright, the chorus is pointed and then there's that 'la de da' part that is pretty much built for a crowd to sing. The video is a blast too: a Model UN at a fancy prep school, with Meloy as a power-mad student representing the United States and picking on poor Luxembourg. In March 2005 the band put it out online through BitTorrent, one of the first music videos ever released that way.

The back half never lets up. 'The Engine Driver' is one of Meloy's prettiest melodies, and 'On The Bus Mall' is a tender, rough-edged story about two runaway kids getting by on the streets of Portland. Then comes the main event, 'The Mariner's Revenge Song,' almost nine minutes of accordion, sea shanty and a vengeance tale that ends with two men inside the belly of a whale. It's ridiculous and gripping, and you'll want to hear it again immediately. 'Of Angels And Angles' closes things out soft and short, like the house lights coming up.

When it came out in 2005, the reviews were mostly raves. Critics heard a band that had grown up fast, with a bigger, fuller sound and songs that finally matched Meloy's ambitions. A few found the vocabulary and the theater a little much, and that has always been part of the deal with The Decemberists. The album made it to No. 128 on the Billboard 200 and into the top five of the Heatseekers chart, a big deal for an indie band in 2005. Looking back now, a lot of writers and fans hear 'Picaresque' as the moment The Decemberists became The Decemberists, and some still call it their best. It turned up on best-of-the-decade lists, and by the end of 2005 the band had signed with Capitol. 'The Crane Wife' followed in 2006, and 'The King Is Dead' went to No. 1 in 2011.

That September the band brought these songs to Zilker Park on the Sunday of the 2005 Austin City Limits Music Festival, and I was there. I loved every minute of it. What I remember most is how the band got the whole crowd involved. They didn't just play for us, they pulled everybody in, and before long the field turned into one big singalong. Those songs were made for a stage, and that day they got one, plus a few thousand backup singers. It was the kind of set that turns a band you like into a band you love.

If you want it on vinyl, the original US pressing on Kill Rock Stars is a double LP. The album takes up the first three sides, and side four is a bonus EP of outtakes called 'Picaresqueties.' The European version on Rough Trade fit the album onto a single LP without the extras. For the tenth anniversary there was a red vinyl Record Store Day edition in 2015, and Kill Rock Stars has kept it in print since then, so it's not hard to find a copy.

My take: 'Picaresque' is a whole night at the theater in about 53 minutes, and it still holds up. Play it start to finish, turn it up for 'The Mariner's Revenge Song' and don't be shy about singing along. That's how it was meant to be heard.