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Home > Austin Music Source > Archives > 2008 > September > 08 > Entry
CD review: Okkervil River rolling
While recording “The Stage Names,” which Harp magazine named the best album of 2007, Austin-based Okkervil River was moved by a simple mantra: Be generous. Give the fans more of everything. The lyrics were the easy part, as prolific frontman Will Sheff has become something of an Oscar Wilde of the Pitchfork set, but the band would also give their fans more instrumentation, more musical ideas, more styles to latch on to.
The generosity continues with “The Stand Ins,” in stores today, which is built on songs written for “The Stage Names.” The original plan was to record a double disc, but humility prevailed.
“It just seemed too much,” Sheff says from Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lives when not touring or visiting his bandmates in Austin. He has nine more phone interviews after mine, so the time limit is 10 minutes, and Sheff, 32, spends most of it talking about just how crucial the upcoming presidential election is. But he does eventually address the double CD idea and how the more ridiculous it seemed, the more it appealed to him. Half of the 16 songs Sheff brought to the band and producer Brian Beattie in late 2006 seemed to be about the other half; why not put them together? “But eventually we decided it was better to concentrate on two short sets than to put out this big, bloated thing,” Sheff says.
Unlike the 1991 “Use Your Illusion” project — two single discs released the same day by Guns N’ Roses — Okkervil put a year between “Stage Names” and “Stand Ins.” But spiritually they’re a double CD, with both discs loosely themed on the effects of fame achieved and denied.
If you place the album cover of the new one under last year’s, the drawings fit together. Also, the credits and “thanks to” pages are almost identical. Both CD booklets isolate snippets of “Okkervil River,” the book by Russian writer Tatyana Tolstaya that gave the band its unwieldy name 10 years ago.
But where “Stage Names” was an instant delight, shattering the “lit rock” tag with big guitar riffs and a touch of mascara, “The Stand Ins” is a more difficult record. After the joyful opener “Lost Coastlines,” featuring a duet with Sheff and recently departed Jonathan (Shearwater) Meiburg, it seemed somewhat dense and dreary on first listen.
The albums you love the most, that stand up over time: Doesn’t it seem that those are the records you didn’t like much on the first couple of listens? I’m thinking about Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska” and “Get Happy!” by Elvis Costello and the Attractions and everything by the Velvet Underground. We want to be entertained, not challenged, but hang in there and you just may have a friend for life.
So although I was initially disappointed by “The Stand Ins,” I wasn’t too worried that Austin’s gift to the indie rock world had shoved out a dud. Out of respect for “The Stage Names” and 2005’s “Black Sheep Boy,” the album that put this River on the map, I played “Stand Ins” about every two or three days. I quickly came around on “Starry Stairs,” the companion to last year’s “Savannah Smiles,” told from the point of view of the suicidal porn star Shannon “Savannah” Wilsey. And sly rocker “Pop Lie” soon proved to be this year’s “Our Life Is a Movie or Maybe.” But most of the other songs sounded too long. Of the painfully slow “Blue Tulip,” I wrote in a notepad that it was “a cattleguard for further listening.”
Then one morning I woke up with a melody on my mind, one I knew was from a record I’d been listening to, but which one? It sounded vaguely like a Will Sheff song, so I put on “Stand Ins” and found the unshakeable ditty was “On Tour With Zykos,” a song I hadn’t thought much of before. After “Zykos” played, I listened to the whole album, and I know it’s a cliche, but I “got” it. The complicated succession of musical tones all made sense, as if Sheff (like Robert Pollard from Guided By Voices) possesses this magical gift to pull melodies out of his pockets like candies for begging children.
“The kids all waited to meet the man in bright green who had dreamed up the dream that they wrecked their hearts upon,” Sheff sings in “Pop Lie,” continuing, “He’s the liar who lied in his pop songs, and you’re lying when you’re singing along.” The song is clearly not autobiographical.
Has any other Austin band created such an extremely high level of recorded music in such a short time?
No.
“The Stage Names” and “The Stand Ins,” tributaries that meet at a larger body, are the local scene’s “Exile On Main Street” (another classic I didn’t like much at first). There’s just so much in those records. Be generous, indeed.
As “The Stage Names” ended with “John Allyn Smith Sails,” a last look at life from a bridge through the eyes of poet John Berryman, “The Stand Ins” closes with another tragically misunderstood figure whose promise turns to depression and then death. “Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed On the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel 1979” is based on little-known ’70s rocker Jobriath (real name Campbell). The year 1979 was the midpoint between when Jobriath was dropped by Elektra after dismal LP sales and when he succumbed to AIDS.
“Bruce Wayne Campbell” is the most difficult song on a difficult album, a weary tale of a sad, proud man who never had everything he was told he’d get, yet still felt as if he lost it all.
Sheff’s voice breaks under the weight. The air becomes uncomfortable. But as the song goes on, there’s something happening musically; a line of sweet nostalgia inspires a happy rhythm. A string section, stray horns, galloping drums and carnival steel guitars converge in a gorgeous blast of dignity. It’s not “Sloop John B,” but it’s all right.
That’s something good about splitting a double CD: two endings.
ACL Fest: Okkervil River will play the fest, Sunday, 5:30 p.m., AT&T Blue Room stage.
(Photo by Steve Gullick JAGJAGUWAR)
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By Gus
September 9, 2008 9:38 AM | Link to this
More new sincerity? Back to plugging pretentious local garbage? This band is boring and lacking talent. That guy is no poet! Ick! Plastic and fake. I have a question to ask you that many Austin music lovers are dying to hear the answer to. Do these crappy bands pay you up front or do you receive some other sort of compensation?