eMusic Review 0
The lessons of adolescence come hard in The Silver Gymnasium, Okkervil River’s seventh and most expansive record to date. A dog-eared novelization of Will Sheff’s teenage years in Meridian, New Hampshire (the lyrics are even written out in paragraphs instead of verses), Gymnasium is full of the classic literary symbols of lost innocence: falling autumn leaves, broken bones, crashed cars too big for their drivers. Sheff tumbles through the stories not so much like Holden Caulfield as Gene from A Separate Peace, a brainy, vulnerable kid trying to make sense of a world that seems increasingly alien and violent. In “It Was My Season,” which opens the album, as all good prologues should, with a rolling silent-movie style piano, he engages in a torturous late-night back-and-forth with a friend — and, possibly, lover — he’ll soon leave behind, fighting it out beneath the glow of an Atari before telescoping out at the last second to become grown-up Sheff saying, “I look back on it now and remember how mixed up I got/ before they got me sorted out.” It’s the first of the album’s many whip-pans, swooping away from young Will to his adult counterpart imbuing painful recollections with an… read more »
