Okkervil River

By gaiJen, stranger in a strange land

This Austin based indie-folk, alt-country, rock collective just might break your heart.

The album Black Sheep Boy is confession made music and if you’re an emotional voyeur like myself, attracted to the anonymous disclosures of Post Secret and the small significances of old love letters found in used books, the brazen outpourings of lexically-lose front-man Will Sheff will weave it’s thrilling spell of the deeply personal made public around you. The opening song “Black Sheep Boy” reminds me of the Rivers Cuomo’s “Butterfly” off of Pinkerton; both simple and devastating songs about loneliness and disconnect. “For Real” reads like the Live Journal entry of the spurned and slightly cracked. “Stone” is a ‘why can’t it be me’ complaint from a boy with the benefit of perspective. Black Sheep Boy is an album that slowly wins you over with each listen and as you journey with Sheff through his emotionally jagged landscape little pieces embed themselves in the soles of your shoes, small pebbles that stick and stay with you as you walk on.

The Stage Names is less raw as an album; still the same lyricism and strong personal narrative but slick production protects the soft hidden heart like a carapace. “Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe” opens the album with muted guitar that is punctuated by a jolt of frolicking piano. “A Hand to Take Hold of the Scene” describes our perverse attraction to celebrity. “Savannah Smiles” describes a father who finds his daughter’s diary and realizes that he hardly knows this person that he loves so much. Oh, and the song has bells in it that are very pretty in a simple and dreary kind of way. “Plus Ones” has been hailed as the best song Okkervil River has produced to date. I don’t agree. I don’t even think that it is the best song on this album (I alternate between “Our Life is Not a Movie”, “Just Kicks” and “John Allyn Smith Sails”). Today, as of this moment, “John Allyn” is my favorite on the album. I think it is the re-imagined Beach Boys ditty “Sloop John B” that pushes it over the finish line first.

The Stand Ins is more alt-country rock than indie folk. “Lost Coastlines” is freewheeling and it has tambourines (!!) and I just want to bop along and get lost while listening to this song. It ebbs and flows and cartwheels and rocks and rolls and it goes “la la lalalala lala lala laaaa oh oh oh”. “Singer Songwriter” and “Pop Lie” are vitriolic (You’ve got taste, You’ve got taste | What a waste that that’s all you have) but so damn catchy that you miss the biting insults the first go-round. Something about “Calling and Not Calling My Ex” evokes Ben Folds Five, which is not meant as a bad thing. “Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979” ends the album. The Stand Ins is no Black Sheep Boy but here again Will Sheff shatters my heart when he says: “Sick with singing the same songs | In the bars, they’ll soon be drinking | Let’s cash my check and drink along | Old times, hello I’ve missed you | Old life, hey now, let me in…”