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Live review: Okkervil River at the Scoot Inn
(John Pesina FOR AMERICAN-STATESMAN)
- Photos: Okkervil River at the Scoot Inn
Okkervil River releases a new album in a couple weeks, after a year or two off recording “True Love Cast Out All Evil” with Roky Erikson and playing some shows with the psych rock pioneer. The new material doesn’t always match up to the band’s best stuff on “The Stage Names” or maybe even “Black Sheep Boy,” but a lot of it is strong. Lead Okkervilian Will Sheff has pulled off the task of writing a solid set of songs that doesn’t sound like a rehash of his other material, which isn’t an easy feat for a group that has been around for more than a decade.
They’re about to take this new stuff out on the road, and so as a warmup, the group played a last-minute show in the cozy confines of the Scoot Inn on Monday night. After a couple old tunes, “For Real” and “Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe”, Sheff announced that the band would play the entire new album, and that it would be the first time they played about 70 percent of the songs. Playing an album in order is a practice that can be boring, so at that point the show was kind of up in the air.
Okkervil has never been super-consistent in a live setting anyway, and as they kicked into the first few songs, “The Valley,” “Piratess” and “Rider,” Sheff was a bit out of key. He noticed it, too, and asked for more monitor so that he could hear himself. They stopped after side A and broke into more older tunes, including “John Allyn Smith Sails,” the band’s kind of corny, kind of great number that makes its way into “Sloop John B”/”The John B Sails”. It was good move that breathed some energy into the set. After that it was back into the new with “White Shadow Waltz,” one of the stronger new songs. Like other good Okkervil material, there is an appealing tension present between structure and chaos that sounds like Sheff is on the brink of going mad. Next was “We Need A Myth,” another of the more powerful new songs, but it lacked the power of the studio version, which lays on the strings pretty thick. Despite drummer Cully Syminton’s best efforts, the song needed something to fill it out, and the lone violin wasn’t doing the job.
A highlight of the last section of songs was the emotional “Your Past Life As A Blast,” which, like some of the other numbers, was kind of raw. After “Wake and Be Fine” and “The Rise” the band left the stage but hurried back on for a quick encore, “Unless It’s Kicks,” which of course killed, before the live music curfew forced them off stage. Looking back, it was probably more fun to see the band working out these songs for the first time than it would have been if everything was perfectly polished. On a humid Monday night with the smell of cigarettes and booze in the air, a not-perfect but still pretty good Okkervil felt just right with the surprisingly small crowd and Scoot Inn’s outdoorsy stage.
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