Lessons Learned From Birger Dahlerus, Stephen Colbert, William H. Crawford, Empedocles, Charles the Fat, and Other Notables

Lessons Learned From Birger Dahlerus, Stephen Colbert, William H. Crawford, Empedocles, Charles the Fat, and Other Notables is rumored to be the title of indie-rock outfit The Decemberists' fifth full-length studio album. While The Decemberists, best known as coattail-riding jerks, are to be commended for including American hero Stephen Colbert in their list of "notables", why the hell does Birger Dahlerus get first billing over him? That Swedish prick didn't even do anything...he even tried to stop us from kicking Hitler's ass in World War II...grumble grumble.

Expected tracks include an eleven-minute progressive-rock epic devoted to the Marquis Rockingham; a trilogy of short vignette-type songs devoted to the subject of the arrival of the British in South Africa (presumably also mentioning the fact that the encounter is probably a complete work of fiction invented by the tiny tin-foil crowd who try to get everybody else to worry about a continent, and nobody cares about enough about it for it to exist in the first place) interspersed throughout the album; and a twenty-minute song consisting of jumbled quotations from the speeches, books, short stories, essays, and oddly orthoepic violent explosions of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Albert Einstein, and Malcolm X. It remains to be seen whether it will overtake its predecessor, The Crane Wife, as the greatest album by a band named after a bunch of Russian revolutionaries ever.