Okkervil River

LP is really good, by the way. Great return to form after the last one

So yeah, this album is still great.

I hope (assume) this is the appropriate place to post this: http://okkervilriver.com/goldenopportunities

thanks!

Yesterday, on a bit of a whim, I finally sought out the Tolstoya short story these guys took their name from, & I must say..... it was not at all what I expected!

in retrospect, "Okkervil River" the story has much less in common with "Okkervil River Song" than it does with the Stage Names/Stand-Ins twofer

I've tried so hard to love this band. I feel like if they'd put out about 50% fewer songs that were 15% better, then maybe.

Just give Black Sheep Boy one attentive spin from start to finish.

some of the music these guys have put out is so, so good. i just keep forgetting to check for new stuff

still listen to the stage names once every couple of months

Really loved them for a while, circa Stage Names and Stand Ins. There are definitely some knockout songs - "Unless It's Kicks" forever and ever please. But after while his bellow starts to grate. I burned out on most of the stuff I like, and the last couple of albums have not registered with me at all.

I kinda loved I Am Very Far despite the maddeningly inconsistent production but the last album was such a drag

i actually liked the last album a lot more than the previous few idk

though really they're a band with a lot of great songs but only one great album (black sheep boy)

Yeah last album had some catchy songs. Seemed very focused. I Am Very Far felt like a band trying to make lightning strike but didn't wanna put the work into the songs

barack sheep boy

I prefer The Stage Names to Black Sheep Boy, tbh

Damn, both of those Obama playlists are excellent

Stand Ins > Stage Names > Black Sheep Boy >>> First couple albums >>>>>>>>> Last two albums :'(

Never really got BSB but enjoy it a lot everytime I give it a listen, listen to Stand Ins once a month, love every track - especially "Singer Songwriter" and "Calling and Not Calling My Ex" which is also a great christmas song. "Girl in Port" makes me come back to Stage Names again and again. And "Savannah Smiles".

Bought IAVF too but was so dissappointed - dislike the production and songs seem underdeveloped/overthought. Gave Gymnasium a quick listen but it's not for me - feel like Sheff is stretching/trying too hard, where the songs on Stand Ins sound like they wrote themselves. Love his prosaic/novelistic lyrics on SN/SI.

Anyway, I'm sure Okkervil will return with GREAT material at some point.

i think Black Sheep Boy is their masterpiece with Down the River of Golden Dreams being a very close second. also very much in love with Stand Ins and The Stage Names. the others are not even close to those four albums.

BSB : one of the best album covers ever.
I love it.

"Hanging By a Hit," "Show Yourself" and "Lay of the Last Survivor" are some of my fave OR tunes. I finally grew to love "Your Past Life As a Blast" after a while, too - it did that breezy vibe better than anything on the most recent album, imo. Also loved the IAVF-era b-side "Walked Out On a Line," a v creepy song that would have been a better closer than the one on the album.

Timely revive for me, I've been listening to this band a lot lately. "Mermaid" is another great song (the A-side of "Walked Out on a Line", right?) which should really have been included on I Am Very Far.

Stage Names is still their masterpiece for me with BSB running it a close second. I like IAVF fine, don't get the critical opprobrium it gets. Can't get into the last one at all.

I like 'em all but IAVF definitely took a long time to grow on me -- all the songs feel about twice as long as they actually are, which is a dubious accomplishment

& since nobody else has mentioned it yet, I gotta throw some love to the Sleep & Wake-Up Songs EP

oh lol it's literally the fist reply to the thread v_v still a great record though!

just realized will sheff sings a whole lot like jonathan richman!

New one streaming on NPR:

http://www.npr.org/2016/09/01/491942048/first-listen-okkervil-river-away

Cool. At first listen this sounds like a real return to form after The Silver Gymnasium, which I still can't get into despite repeated plays.

Will is one of my fave frontmen

sounds stellar, a return to form - but also a lot of new territory, getting some Van Morrison/Joni Mitchell vibes in terms of song dynamics

i liked silver gymnasium more than most of y'all; it'd be in my top three w/ bsb and stage names. it's got some real joyful moments.

new one sounds to be more in the vein of golden dreams, which i'd put just a cut below those.

I'll give Silver Gym another go

I rank Stand Ins and Stage Names as perfect records, BSB obv also v v good, rarely listen to the early albums, forgot abt Golden Dreams (should revisit) and their "downfall" started w IAVF

This one is completely distinct from their previous output imo - almost nothing in the way of crescendos/indie-rock songwriting tropes beyond a couple of moments here and there. It sounds to me explicitly like a set of eulogies, except for the stream-of-consciousness closing track. (I guess more like "bouts-of-consciousness" based on the NPR writeup.)

The new Okkervil River album is called ‘Away’. I didn’t plan to make it and initially wasn’t sure if it was going to be an Okkervil River album or if I’d ever put it out. I wrote the songs during a confusing time of transition in my personal and professional life and recorded them quickly with a brand new group of musicians. I got together the best New York players I could think of, people whose playing and personalities I was fans of and who came more out of a jazz or avant garde background, and we cut the songs live in one or two takes – trying to keep things as natural and immediate as possible – over three days in a studio on Long Island that hosts the Neve 8068 console which recorded Steely Dan’s Aja and John Lennon’s Double Fantasy. I asked Marissa Nadler to sing on it and got the composer Nathan Thatcher to write some beautiful orchestral arrangements, we recorded them with the classical ensemble and then I mixed the record with Jonathan Wilson out in Los Angeles.

from http://www.stereogum.com/1877894/okkervil-river-okkervil-river-r-i-p/mp3s/

I really love this record. it reminds me a lot of the most recent counting crows record (compliment) in the way scheff stretches out lyrically, packing a lot of information into these songs but still communicating very directly and clearly. the arrangements are also v gorgeous and spacious

great hangover record too

I just noticed that "The Industry" references The Silver Gymnasium's Pitchfork score

xp important quality! was there ever a hangover record thread?
God Save The Clientele probably my all time #1

that album art...

... perhaps works well on a big canvas

i liked silver gymnasium quite a lot, i thought it was better as an album than the previous few even if the high points weren't as high

will listen to this new one asap

there is indeed a hangover music thread

hehe, I see

the instrumentation on "judey on a street" sounds imported from a van morrison record

Love that bopping bassline, and the way it peters out like a fading pulse

Interesting to read about how "Days Spent Floating" was recorded, it totally does sound like an afterthought, but somehow not in a bad way. Loosens out into almost nothing.

"Red" and "Kansas City" is an all-time one-two punch imo

I haven't given a shit about OR since The Stage Names. What is that, nine years ago? To this day, Black Sheep Boy is the only front-to-back great album in my book. And if I'm honest, from The Stage Names, only "Savannah Smiles" is the song that floors me to this day - that song is really an all-time "sad-bastard" classic.

I remember making copy CDs of BSB for all my friends - easily an album that translated across most of my friend-base, even among the "12-CD-a-year-club" friends that we all share. Given all that, I'm kind of surprised how little I care about a new release from this band. Their last couple have left me so cold. But I guess I still have some hope...

give it a shot, my experience is basically parallel to yours

Soooooo yeah I think this might be the best thing Sheff's done so far.

great song, he talks a bit about it here https://uproxx.com/music/okkervil-river-interview-in-the-rainbow-rain-love-somebody-video/

album's a grower too, Sheff's such a humanist (reminds me of DFW, less mathematically rational, more spiritual)

yeah he seems like a good dude for sure

New monthly live series and request tour this summer, one album per month. I actually really appreciate that it's a digital-only affair (there are too many boutique vinyl releases these days), even if the whole thing is a little steep for me.

First release has a gorgeous, glacial "For Real"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuI3rA0Odls

apropos of nothing, "The President's Dead" plays *very* differently these days. Try it!

Just saw that Travis Nelsen, Okkervil's drummer from Black Sheep Boy to The Stand Ins, has passed.

I wish I had more to contribute on the subject, but I'll just add that his drumming on Black Sheep Boy is a perfect complement to the high dramatics of the album, and he was very fun to watch live.

oh man that sucks. I've been playing "black sheep boy #4" a ton lately

basically every song those sessions produced is incredible, Sheff and co. were on fire and Brian Beattie's production work was remarkable. I'm shocked he didn't become a go-to studio magician after that.

new Sheff solo on the way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph-zatqd8Go

single sounds like an album track, not bad

sounds like an Okkervil River record to me
https://willsheff.bandcamp.com/album/nothing-special

3 listens in, very good

When this snuck out I didn't read any press around it so I didn't think about it possibly presaging the end of Okkervil River and that he would be going out as a solo artist going forward. Of course he wrote a song called "RIP Okkervil River" but then went and released another album under that name. Well this interview certainly seems to suggest that Okkervil River is indeed no more:

https://www.stereogum.com/2201956/will-sheff-after-okkervil/interviews/qa/

that's a v good interview, thx!

Sheff is more invested in interrogating why Okkervil River was able to thrive, not in spite of its occasionally vengeful and violent music, but because of it. Specifically, whether they helped reinforce what Sheff describes as “the Harry Potter narrative,” in which we’re all misunderstood wizards stuffed in the Cupboard Under the Stairs, waiting for our magical capacities to be discovered. There certainly was a revenge-of-the-nerds element to mid-aughts indie culture, from TV to film to Black Sheep Boy itself, which generated comparisons to contemporaries like Bright Eyes, the Decemberists, the National and Arcade Fire — feverishly literary groups armed with seriously uncool instruments that cloaked their darker undertones with an invigorating, us-against-the-world mentality. Sheff worries about “the men out there who feel like the world stiffed them, that they’re owed something,” extrapolating this mindset to a kind of “fascism of superhero movies.” “I started to see my preoccupation with jealousy and what I felt my work deserved.”

"For Real" is def a song that grabbed my attention back then, but now my favorite record is Away, and that's more or less solo Sheff, so not too concerned with the band name

New album is v good, hightlights include title track and In The Thick of It

this is sad:

he estimates that he’ll end his East and West coast tours approximately $5-7,000 in the red. He expects to lose double that going to Europe