Okkervil River. . . Pretension is in. Being a fucking idiot is, apparently , out. . .

 Music review: Okkervil River deliver an indie magnum opus

Okkervill River, I Am Very Far (Jagjaguar)
The Burg Staff on May. 11, 2011
By Matt Ashare

Rock songs that deal with the trials and tribulations of being in a rock band are a tricky business. I mean, do we really need any more songs about how hard life on the road is? And does anyone who works a 9-to-5 job really care that getting paid to play can have an adverse effect on the artistic temperament? Then again, we tend to have a certain fascination with the human trainwrecks who populate “reality” TV franchises like MTV’s “Celebrity Rehab,” and the rise/fall/redemption storylines that kept VH-1’s “Behind the Music” in business for so many years.
     Will Sheff, the main brain behind the Austin-based band Okkervil River, expertly tapped into the allure of the troubled artist on 2005’s “Black Sheep Boy,” an album loosely based on ’60s folk singer Tim Harden’s struggles with heroin addiction — a battle he finally lost when he overdosed in 1980.
     Sheff’s way with words, his storyteller’s eye for detail, and his moody demeanor all helped elevate him to a top spot among indie rock’s literati (see Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes, and Win Butler of the Arcade Fire). And “Black Sheep Boy” not only inspired a sequel — the 2005 EP “Black Sheep Boy Appendix” — it also led Sheff to mine the lives of other tragically flawed artists, including the poet John Berryman (suicide, 1972) in “John Allyn Smith Sails,” and an obscure, probably schizophrenic glam-rocker Jobriath (AIDS, 1983) in “Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Hotel Chelsea, 1979” (both from the 2007 disc “The Stand Ins”).
     So, yeah, it would be entirely fair to say that Sheff has rarely, if ever, shown any fear in the face of pretension. And he’s never wavered from the grand gesture, a tendency he exploits to its fullest on Okkervil River’s new “I Am Very Far.” (BTW: the band’s named for a short story by the Russian writer Tatyana Tolstoya.)
    There’s no overarching theme or concept uniting the 11 tracks on “I Am Very Far,” unless you count Sheff’s unwaveringly grim worldview. A dark shadow lies over the thump of “The Valley,” a wordy epic that finds a characteristically poetic Sheff watching “The sun switching in the sky off and on/While a friend stands bleeding on a late summer lawn/A slicked back bloody black gun shot to the head/He has fallen in the valley of the rock and roll dead.”
     For someone who’s always seemed more than a little suspicious of music industry machinations, Sheff’s got Okkervil River sounding suspiciously like Grammy winners the Arcade Fire on the neo-new wave “Pirates,” where he cryptically croons about “a murderess/Moved by writing a song/We agreed that it was wrong/And to believe in it,” and even more so on the urgent, orchestral “Rider,” a track filled with apocalyptic visions like “Over the ruins like we’re staggering apes/What we get is what we take/In a split open place where a man can get kinged/In a palace of panic and flames.”
     Sheff, who produced the disc, even does Win Butler’s two-drummers trick one better: “Rider” and the plaintively pounding “Wake and Be Fine” are fully stocked with two pianists, two bassists, seven guitarists, and, yes, two drummers.
     For all its arty extravagances — along with tympani, tuba, and bassoon, Sheff employs the found sounds of crashing cabinets, unreeling duct tape, and, on “Pirates,” a fast-forwarding cassette tape — “I Am Very Far” manages to stay within the bounds of indie-rock accessibility a la the aforementioned Arcade Fire and Decemberists. If that means Sheff may soon be dealing with some of the same pressures that ultimately undermined Tim Harden’s career, at least it’s a subject he’s studied well. http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/music_review_okkervil_river_deliver_an_indie_magnum_opus
Ashare, a freelance writer living in Lynchburg who teaches journalism at Randolph College, is the former music editor for the Boston Phoenix, the former reviews editor for CJJ New Music Monthly, and a fan of music of other cultural emissions.