OKKERVIL RIVER

TEXT: Lydia Sprague  |||  PHOTO: Alexandra Valenti  |||  LABEL: Jagjaguwar

Intricate stories that span throughout albums, deep brooding lyrics that unravel and reveal sometimes dark assertions on the human soul; organs, soft string instruments, trumpets and acoustic guitars, soft crackling vocals — ohh I’m swooning! One band, one record even, encapsulating everything I love most about music. This is my love letter to Okkervil River...

Sometimes music makes you sad, sometimes music makes you happy. Sometimes it makes you think, makes you wish you could write poetry, makes you wish you could articulate what, exactly, it is that a particular line in a particular song is pricking at inside your heart. It is rare when you find a group of musicians whose music does all of these things. In one single verse, frontman Will Sheff can go from softly cooing lyrics about loving somebody who is fixated on another, to screeching about having a heart of stone. So eloquent, so brilliant!

From “A Stone”:  “And I think that I know the bitter dismay of a lover who brought fresh bouquets every day, when she turned him away to remember some naive who once gave just one rose one day, years ago,”

One of the most wonderful things about Okkervil River is Sheff’s penchant for storytelling. His lyrics are poetry, oft grim, but never frightening, his verses sometimes seem like cautionary tales. But the words don’t tell us the whole story. The music itself does as much storytelling as the lyrics, maybe more. The band employs instruments like steel guitars, mandolins, cellos, trumpets, organs and banjos to illustrate its stories. Every chord dripping with depth, emotion; Sheff’s crackling, straining vocals the perfect pairing with the tone of the music, the perfect narrator for these lurid, fantastic stories.

One listen to Black Sheep Boy, the band’s 2005 release, will tell you all you need to know about this folk and blues-rooted band. The songs encapsulate a perfect scale of delicate songwriting, set with soft melodies and moving to tumultuous guitar riffs and crashing symbols while Sheff’s straining vocals scream out revelations of unrequited love — feelings of love and desperation for somebody who will never notice you, because they are in love with a stone: something dead, someone who will never love them quite the right way. Of course, it’s not so simple. And with each listen, the lyrics come to mean something new. Its intricacies begin to open up, to let you in to their deeper meanings.

Three records later, and Black Sheep Boy is still, for me, the ultimate Okkervil River record. It is essential on a road trip, alone in my car crooning along with Sheff, feeling every rhythm as if it’s the first time I’ve listened to it. The record is like a best friend, the more time you spend with it, the more it reveals itself to you — the more attention you pay to its subtleties, the better you come to understand it.

The band’s latest release, I Am Very Far, is a prime example of Sheff’s poignant storytelling. From the opening track "The Valley," in which we march through a valley of rock and roll dead, bodies piled up at the river, the listener is taken on a trip into Sheff’s vividly wild imagination. We also hear about soft-sighing daughters finding their fathers face down on the ground in "Lay of the Last Survivor," and in what Sheff describes as an upbeat, happy song we hear the protagonist’s married lover describe life with her husband in "Hanging From A Hit."

"And I flash with fire / and I limp from life / and I’m blazing blind / and I’m surging live / and give up my mind / when with him."

And while this type of storytelling is nothing new to Okkervil River, on this, its sixth full-length release, it has broken away from its habit of releasing themed albums. I Am Very Far, which Sheff produced on his own, was recorded in short sessions at several studios around the country. Though each song draws upon similar themes, they seem more like separate entities than one continuous, solid concept.

On I Am Very Far the songs seem bigger, more grandiose than previous Okkervil River records. Almost all of the tracks are layered, creating a wall of sound that Okkervil River has never quite attempted on its records. Many of the songs feature multiple drummers playing simultaneously, blasting horns, and layered vocals. Album opener, "The Valley," starts out with a rumble of handicapping, leading into a guitar riff and a beating drum. We then hear Sheff’s layered, almost chanting vocals: "We watch the sun switching in the sky, off and on, where our friend stands bleeding on the late summer lawn, a slicked back bloody black gunshot to the head. He has fallen in the valley of the rock and roll dead."

It’s pretty cool that after six full-length releases, three of which being themed, Okkervil River is still able to keep its sound fresh, and its stories captivating to fans old and knew. With its bigger, heavier sound on I Am Very Far, Okkervil River has, once again, reinvented itself. But with familiar organs, oboes, trumpets and dark stories, we’re reassured that this is the same band we’ve loved for over ten years.





FREE MP3s

+ “Wake and be Fine”
+ “Pop Lie”
+ “Lost Coastlines”
+ “Our Live Is Not A Movie Or Maybe”
+ “The President’s Dead”
+ “No Key No Plan”
+ “Black Sheep Boy”
+ “For Real”
+ “It Ends With A Fall”
+ “Your Past Life As A Blast” (new from recent album, I Am Very Far)




PRESS

“[I Am Very Far is] an audacious, ambitious, maximalistic approach, and in the process Sheff has reinvented the sound of his band… Lyrically, these are songs that are closer to the fractured nightmares of ’66 Dylan than to anything Sheff has recorded in the past… What we have here is something much closer to the trashcan symphonies of Tom Waits than to the guitar-driven indie rock of previous Okkervil River albums.” — Paste Magazine

“Even at its fever-dreamiest, the record projects an urgency that marks it as a product of Okkervil River. It’s no longer the Okkervil River of The Stage Names or Black Sheep Boy, and that’s a plus: I Am Very Far signals that the band’s gifts with song and sentiment were never tied to specificity.” — The A.V. Club





LINKS

+ Okkervil River official Website
+ Okkervil River on Facebook
+ Okkervil River on Twitter

Far From Home Ep#17 
Okkervil River "I Guess We Lost" from Into The Woods on
Vimeo.