What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World is the seventh studio album from The Decemberists, released on January 20, 2015. The album's title comes from a line in the song "12/17/12", a reference to the date of Barack Obama's speech in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and lead singer Colin Meloy's conflicting feelings about the shooting and his happy personal life. "What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World" received mostly positive reviews. It currently has a metascore of 77 and user score of 8.1 from Metacritic. "The
Keeps Gettin' Better: A Decade of Hits to build anticipation for what could be a very, very good album." In a mixed review, an editor from "Rolling Stone" said that the album's "ten stellar singles are weighed down by four bland attempts at 2008's trendy, Lady Gaga-jacking electropop." In the United States, "Keeps Gettin' Better: A Decade of Hits" debuted at number nine on the US "Billboard" 200 on the issue date of November 29, 2008, selling 73,000 copies in its first week of release. The album spent six weeks on the Top Catalog Albums, where it peaked at number 2 in 2010. As of September 2014,