Okkervil River

The Stage Names

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www.myspace.com/okkervilriver

The story of Okkervil River’s musical career thus far has been one of gradual refinement. Since lurching out of Austin, Tex., at the dawn of the millennium as a creaky not-quite-alt.-country-band prone to ragged yowls and wobbly catharses, the group spearheaded by hyper-literate front man Will Sheff has sanded down their sharper edges while remaining an uncompromisingly intense musical unit.

The Stage Names, Okkervil’s just released fifth album, finds an expanded lineup of players plowing through Sheff’s most musically direct and pop-leaning set of songs yet, while still maintaining just the right dash of high drama and unhinged intensity to keep the listener on edge. Working as a sextet featuring longtime members Sheff, keyboardist/backing vocalist Jonathan Meiburg and drummer Travis Nelson alongside newer members who joined the ranks while touring behind 2005 breakout album Black Sheep Boy (bassist Patrick Pestorious, guitarist Brian Cassidy, and trumpet/keyboard player Scott Brackett), Stage Names finds the group abandoning the overdub heavy studio wizardry of its predecessor in favor of a more muscular and live leaning sound. It’s still full to be sure – how could it not be with so many instrumentalists in the mix -  but it sounds more like six guys playing in a room rather than hunched over a recording console.

The opening three tracks feature more electric guitar than probably the entirety of the group’s previous recorded output, and for the first time on an Okkervil River album the bass takes a more prominent melodic role (particularly on the Motown-ish hand clapper “A Hand to Take Hold of the Scene”). Whereas once Sheff’s immaculately sculpted tales of broken dreams, murderous deceit and ill-fated liaisons were likely to culminate in throat-rattling screams, they’re now far more likely to be delivered in a slightly detached and tuneful tenor. Perhaps Sheff’s willingness to restrain his windpipes more on The Stage Names is due to the added punch of his backing partners, Meiburg - who also fronts the highly praised outfit Shearwater - takes a particularly active and dramatic backing vocal role on numerous tracks, employing his manic operatic tenor in full force, and rarely does a chorus go by that isn’t punctuated by blasts from Brackett’s trumpet.

Sheff’s idiosyncratic voice, however, remains Okkervil’s ultimate calling card and an instrument capable of spine tingling moments, as is perhaps best captured on the meditative number, “Savannah Smiles.” A vignette capturing the strained brief return home of an emotionally distant collegiate daughter and her befuddled father told from the father’s perspective, the track further cements Sheff as one of the deftest storytellers working the modern indie-music circuit: (“Shannon just flew down. / Four days back in town. / She sleeps and lies around. / And then she goes out. / And then one day she’s gone. / What should I have done? / Joe turns the TV on with all the lights out. / The photos on the wall. / She’s my baby, she’s my baby doll. / Is she someone I don’t know at all. / Is she someone I betrayed?”) Sheff delivers the ballad of unspoken disappointment in alternately hopeful and resigned intonation, floating atop a melody of miniaturized beauty, all gentle string washes and sumptuous xylophone fills, that feels so pristine it wouldn’t be out of place coming out of a music box.

It provides a stark contrast to the following number, “Plus Ones,” a bouncy paean to illogical doomed relationships that cheekily show’s off former rock critic Sheff’s encyclopedic pop music knowledge by riffing on a series of song and album titles (“And what’s new pussycat is you were once a lioness. They cut your claws out.”) while culminating in his well-worn impassioned fatalism (“Let’s make the world’s stupidest stand and truly mean it.”)

This is still an Okkervil River album though, so even pseudo-playful moments are in service of darker truths, a point best exemplified by album closer “John Allyn Smith Sails” a tale of a self-destructive suicide-bent artist  who, at age 31, was “not impressionable, but was upsettable,” that morphs over it’s second half from a mournful acoustic tale into a full bore rewrite of the Beach Boy’s “Sloop John B.” infusing the lines “this is the worst trip I’ve ever been on” with a gallows humor not present in the original.   

Evolution is never easy for any group, that’s why so many artists find their niche and then ride it into the ground, so it’s particularly refreshing to hear an album like The Stage Names from Okkervil River at this point in their career. Given the amount of critical pandemonium that surrounded its predecessor it must have been tempting for Sheff and his cohorts to simply repeat Black Sheep Boy's formula. Thankfully, The Stage Names is a bolder step, an extension of the lyrical complexity that has always marked Okkervil’s work (it’s a far more self-reflective and referential lyrical world than Sheff’s previously ventured to put forth on record) and an expansion of the musical maneuvers at their command.

"Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe"   from The Stage Names