The Decemberists’ 2006 album, The Crane Wife — their major label debut — was an expansive retelling of a Japanese folk tale that even the band’s singer and songwriter, Colin Meloy, admitted to not totally understanding. It included two songs that clocked in at over 10 minutes, and had such impenetrable lyrics that the narrative was more or less unintelligible. It’s hard to follow up a project as ambitious as The Crane Wife, but Meloy’s not one for complacency.

The Hazards of Love, the band’s fifth full-length, is an intricate story about a forbidden romance, a meddling queen and a shape-shifting spectre. Its story is easier to follow than that of The Crane Wife, but Meloy’s wordplay is still second-to-none. Set up like a play, there are several characters at work here — The Rake and William (both voiced by Meloy), Margaret (Lavender Diamond’s Becky Stark) and The Queen (My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden). They each get equal time in both monologues and dialogues, and despite the obvious difficulty of fitting the narrative into listenable songs, Meloy effortlessly balances catchy hooks and plot advancement.

The timing and pacing of the story is uncanny — Meloy has a delicate storyteller’s touch. The album’s first few tracks introduce the characters and set the stage. The conflict builds with the masterful trio of “The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid,” “The Rake’s Song” and “The Abduction of Margaret.” As the story comes to its conclusion (Meloy manages to wrap it all up in under an hour), you’re so interested in the plot that the music, good as it is, hardly seems to matter.

Meloy is one of the few songwriters still making albums that are best consumed whole. In the same way that you wouldn’t pick your favourite scene from a movie or play and watch it over and over again, there’s no sensible way to take any one song out of context here and proclaim it a single in the traditional sense. Meloy demands a lot from his listeners, but then, doesn’t any good storyteller?