Okkervil River, The Stand Ins
On their bracing sixth record, Okkervil River spare no one, least of all themselves.
Billed as a sequel to last year's The Stage Names, the sixth record from Okkervil River, isn't so much a continuation as it is a further rumination on similar themes. Like its predecessor, The Stand-Ins is concerned with the travails of "some mid-level band," but where the protagonists in The Stage Names seemed to stumble dumbly and naively through their misfortunes ("A Girl in Port," in particular, bore the sting of regret), here the characters are harder and crueler and more calculated.
The villains enter early: "Singer Songwriter" is a dead-on evisceration of the kind of privileged folkie that affects penniless bohemianism for the sake of image. Will Sheff's lyrics, which in the past had a tendency to sacrifice clarity for poetry, are agonizingly precise here: "I heard cuts by the Kinks on your speakers," he sneers, "I saw Poe and Artaud on your shelves/ While The Last Laugh's first scene/ On your flat-panel screen/ Lit Chanel that you wrapped 'round yourself." It's blistering and brutal, a 21st-century take on "Positively 4th Street." That the music is a spot-on evocation of Bringin 'It All Back Home doesn't hurt. In fact, The Stand-Ins is best when it's buoyant: "Calling and Not Calling My Ex," which this writer would like to argue is about Chan Marshall (um, evidence to come) rolls along on a broad, brash folk strum as Sheff sighs, "She was once mine/ That smile that shines from the glossy magazine/ That's stuck inside the Sunday Times." "Pop Lie" is a hurricane, too, all bash and clatter and chugging Kinks riffs that take to task "the liar who lied in his pop song."
If that last lyric sounds a bit unreasonable, that's one of The Stand-Ins only drawbacks. Sheff has a tendency to treat his artistic miscreants with a kind of acrid contempt, and periodically his declamations of musicians who dare to conduct themselves with anything other than total integrity can be a bit wearying. But if Sheff demands a lot of his creations, it's likely because he demands a lot of himself. On "Lost Coastlines" he howls "Every night finds us rocking and rolling on waves wild and white/ Where we have lost our way/ But no one will say it outright." Maybe that topic is fodder for Part III?
