For me, at least, live rock music should be cathartic. A catchy melody and a few neat turns of phrase are good, but a show won't be great unless I know the people on stage are confessing, lamenting or raging at something. Until I feel an emotional connection, the songs are just ditties, the performance a play with extremely poor blocking.

That emotive challenge is more acute for the Decemberists than for most bands. A quick listen to any of their albums will reveal that Colin Meloy can write a melody, and pens lyrics that are too clever by at least several halves. But four minutes isn't enough time to connect with any of the chimney sweeps or seafarers' widows from the Herman-Melville-via-Wes-Anderson tableau filling Meloy's fevered English Major brain. The Decemberists have extra ground to make up if they want an audience to relate to their songs in any meaningful way.

They're not entirely successful in the effort. Everyone in the band is a good musician, and they faithfully perform the songs as they appear on the album. A little too faithfully, in fact. What few differences in arrangement there are consist mostly of strange and somewhat arbitrary pauses.

But the overall live sound is their biggest hindrance: it's bright and crisp, with nothing ever vying with Meloy's vocal's for control of the melody. The string noise from an consistent overdeployment of acoustic guitars doesn't help matters. The result is all trebly texture with no substance; the organ, accordion and bass provide decoration rather than an enveloping core.

Maybe the Decemberists just aren't a wall-of-sound kind of band -- but in the cacophonous breakdowns of songs like The Bagman's Gambit and The Mariner's Revenge Song, it seems like they aspire to be. But even these examples are ultimately underwhelming. In those moments, when the band is furiously hammering at their instruments, Meloy ought to be straining to be heard over a noise you can feel in every part of your body. Sadly, they never quite get there.

So the live renditions of the songs provide little more than what's on the album, and I'm left trying to figure out what these weird narratives about alien times and places mean to me, if anything. As much as I like tracks like The Legionnaire's Lament, it's hard to convince myself that they're anything more than catchy curios. And if that's the case, I might as well just grab a thesaurus, put on the Wiggles and dream about pirate ships.

I'm not saying that every song has to be about the girl you'd like to have but can't. But if you're going to write a track about a legionnaire pining for home, convince me that you're interested in the pining, not just looking an excuse to rhyme "fecund" with "laudanum".

I guess what I'm trying to say boils down to this: Colin, go buy some louder guitars.

I was two years old the last time Washington won a playoff series. But now the Wiz are headed to Miami! Needless to say, discussing the likely outcome of that series would be in extremely poor taste right now, so I'll just say that really big guys are much more likely to spontaneously have heart attacks, and consequently the Wizards' chances really aren't all that bad.

And to answer your question: yes, so far the ride on the bandwagon has been quite pleasant and smooth. Wooo! Go Zards!