Okkervil River - The Stage Names

I wrote this up about three or four weeks ago, but, due to a conflict of interest issue, it wasn't able to make it into the paper. Anyway, the album has been out for a while, but it's certainly a good one, so even if you don't read through this...go out and buy it. Now.

Music is under the knife. Engineers like plastic surgeons. Clip, snip, splicing the sound, enhancing and crafting the whole into something perfect and perfectly different. The best of modern technology, the scalpel at it’s finest. And there’s more than one person to whom it seems a travesty to leave the likenesses of Magnum and the former lo-fi minds on the floor of the operating room. Normally, I tend to agree – and then I heard “Stage Names,” the newest release by Okkervil River.

While long-time fans will immediately find the production of “Stage Names” rather disconcerting even as the first notes come tumbling from the speakers, the whole of the album, while it may be polished and bears heavily the effects of the engineer’s touch, is something exceptional that maintains the darkness of the previous discography.

Once again, Sheff rises to that established position as a artisan with his words – the rampant and unabashed nostalgia that has become characteristic of Okkervil appears once more, driven by lyrics macabre and reminiscent, images of violence and prolonged suffering of both Sheff and those portrayed in song.

On “Title Track,” Sheff moans of a seedy underground rank with vice: “And with her morning shoot / Her evening clothes / Don't call her a prostitute / Well, she ain't one of those / Just call her a proper little statue / Come unfroze.” While on the final track of the album, “John Allyn Smith Sails,” he recounts his own self-destruction, “I tried to make my breathing stop…So when my mom and John came in I would be cold.”

Yet, regardless of the tragic, the grisly, the overall feeling of each one of these tracks is hardly one of threat or peril; rather, one of a prolonged remorse and that longing for the shattered stability once possessed.

On “Black Sheep Boy,” we heard the raw moans of Okkervil front man Will Sheff, the content hardly manicured, raw emotion reflecting the doleful words. And while the emotion of Sheff’s lyrics has scarcely been tampered with, the overall sound has shifted along with the production, taking a decidedly poppier sound on the first few tracks of the album.

On “Unless It’s Kicks,” though Sheff laments, “What pulls your body down, that is quicksand / So, we climb out quick, hand over hand / For your mouth's all filled up,” the uncharacteristic upbeat feel and poppy guitars and soaring combinations of horn synths and tambourine compliments almost lead in two different directions that despite their contrast are natural.

(But that’s nothing next to the bell tones, shining bright in major keys, dulcimer resonations that stand alone before the entrance of Sheff’s lamentations.)

That is not at all to say there is nothing left of the original Okkervil. The second half of the album (and certainly the section that fans of the band will enjoy most), there is a regression to the sound of classic Okkervil, to the soft-spoken Sheff and dark folk-indie-pop (you probably didn’t expect that genre, did you?)

The most noteworthy tracks of the album burnish side-by-side at the onset of the second half of the album: “Plus Ones,” and “Girl in Port.” There’s not entirely too much to be said of these two tracks except that they exemplify the best of Sheff’s qualities as a wordsmith and the talent of the whole of the band to fit together seamlessly.

To be quite frank, there is little to nothing wrong with the album as a whole with the exception of the seemingly mismatched musical styles of the beginning and the decidedly polished quality of the album as a whole (if you really want to hold that against them).