The latest Okkervil River album plays a lot like an all-star indie-rock mix tape. There are, somewhat surprisingly, touches of The Strokes (“Unless It’s Kicks”) and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (“A Hand to Take Hold of the Scene”), and, not so surprisingly, Bright Eyes (about half of the other songs). And although there’s nothing that slices as deeply as “For Real”—the song that drove bloggers batty in 2005—frontman Will Sheff remains quite reflective and imaginative, crafting grandiose stories about lost innocence, broken dreams and how reality often can’t live up to fantasy.
While he’s built a career with a sort of Dashboard Confessional-meets-No Depression spewing that doesn’t hold anything back (see the Beach Boys-inspired “John Allyn Smith Sails”), Sheff is also a songwriter who knows restrained and refined. The spare “Savannah Smiles,” about a man who mistakenly reads a page of his daughter’s diary, is a sweet, simple song about how not knowing everything is often the greatest luxury a grown-up can have. Even the Cursive-like “Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe” has, at its core, a lovely melody holding together Sheff’s prose poem about a life story with no climax. For a song about being prosaic, it’s pretty grand.
Okkervil River The Stage Names ***