Okkervil River

by Pete Aleksa
If you have never heard of Okkervil River here is your chance to learn about this rising band before your friends do. Okkervil River is an up and coming indie-rock/folk band based out of Austin, Texas. The band is composed of songwriter/singer Will Sheff and multi-instrumentalists Howard Draper, Jonathan Meiburg, Travis Nelsen, Zachary Thomas, and Seth Warren. With their new album Black Sheep Boy released in April of this year the band is poised to make major waves and have already garnered critical acclaim, recently receiving a laudatory front page write-up in the New York Times Arts section (ed: I'm not linking, they'd make you pay to read it anyways) while touring with The Decemberists.
The new album begins with a cover of the Tim Hardin song Black Sheep Boy, from which it takes its name, and never looks back, carrying this concept of the Black Sheep Boy throughout the record. Constructed largely of neo-folk ballads, Black Sheep Boy may not be the ideal record to shake one’s ass to. There are however a few cuts that could get the crossed arms crew shuffling their feet, like the up-tempo dark pop pieces “Black” and “The Latest Toughs”. Together, the airy folk and orchestral pop weave a delightful phantasmagoria, blurred together by virtue of the album’s production, in which songs fade out into droning organs and static, and folksy acoustic melodies are underlain with white noise and field recordings.
Throughout the record Will Sheff’s voice quivers with emotion. Most impressive, I found, was Sheff’s performance on “For Real,” a song in which he alternates between the sublime melancholy of The Cure’s Robert Smith and a tortured wail evocative of Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst or Neutral Milk’s Jeff Magnum. A style befitting to Sheff’s brand of wordplay. With an emotional tone that channels the existential yearning of Holden Caulfield, the album thrives on dark poetry and elegant prose passages that read like pages ripped from a storybook. In this capacity Sheff proudly displays himself as a champion of the literati. The band for its part orchestrates the songs beautifully. The wide array of instruments featured on the album—including acoustic and electric guitars, drums, bass, pump organ, mandolin, piano, and synthesizer, among others—adds a whole new dimension to the songs. Not to mention the way the band plays for periods of time with such incredible restraint only to burst forth with well-timed flourishes of accompaniment.
Fans of artists such as Bright Eyes, Neil Young, Neutral Milk Hotel, Elliot Smith, The Decembrists, or Iron and Wine are likely to find Okkervil River right up their alley. The band recently finished a slate of shows opening for Earlimart and will be opening for the rapidly rising indie-pop group Rilo Kiley in June; a gig sure to earn the band its share of hipster cred. Okkervil River’s Black Sheep Boy is released on the indie-rock label Jagjaguwar and I suggest you pick up a copy.