Okkervil River, I Am Very Far
Reviewed by: Chris Bosman
It’s not a surprise, really, what Okkervil River are going to do at this point. Will Sheff is going to drizzle potent poetry over tastefully obtuse folk rock. The band will elegantly shift gears from muscular rock rhythms to key-driven ballads on the turn of a dime. The songs will be carefully arranged even when they seem at their most haphazard, hightening tension and emotion. They’ve been doing this at an incredibly high level since 2005’s Black Sheep Boy, one of last decade’s most underrated albums. What I Am Very Far proves is that Okkervil River is a bit like the new Wilco, doing little to change the overall feel of their music, but still finding new ways to express it.
Last year, Will Sheff produced and the rest of Okkervil River backed the return album of the legendary Roky Erickson after Roky took time out of his SXSW schedule to play with Okkervil River the previous two years. What the team up seems to have done is subtly expanded the palette of the band. Check out the weaving clarinet line of “Lay of the Last Survivor” or or the 40s pop orchestral intro and rolling piano line of “We Need a Myth”. Okkervil River have never been afraid of throwing different things into their mix, but on I Am Very Far they’re more willing than they’ve ever been to not sound like Okkervil River.
Which, and it may sound weird, makes them sound more like Okkervil River than ever. There were times on their last album, 2008’s The Stand Ins, that felt like they were a bit limited by the idea of what Okkervil River sounded like. The incidental music that tied the songs together were a different idea, but a song like “John Allyn Smith Sails” was listenable but predictable. On I Am Very Far they try different ways of getting to the same place, like the cacophonous crescendo of “Mermaid” or the noisy guitar solo of “Show Yourself”. By doing so, they uncover surprising sounds that seem as though they’ve been part of the Okkervil River catalog for a lot longer.
Admittedly, nothing on I Am Very Far strikes quite as profoundly as the bleek character sketches of Black Sheep Boy or the painstaking metaphors of The Stage Names. Maybe it’s because the band sounds cheerier, even if the lyrics of a song like “Your Past Life as a Blast” are pretty violent under the sunny veneer of flutes, 70s style vocal harmonies and brightly strummed guitars. Or maybe its that even at their most dramatic, they never capture the black intensity of something like “So Come Back, I Am Waiting.” Insteady, they opt for a more stately drama, like the abrupt but effortless start/stops of “Wake and Be Fine.” It’s effective, to be sure, but lacks a bit of the unhinged effect that made some of their earlier tracks transcendent.
But the more controlled emotions work on I Am Very Far in a way they never would have earlier in Okkervil River’s career. And while the record doesn’t have the immediate impact of something like the brutal “Black” or bouncy “A Hand to Take Hold of the Scene,” it’s abundant in delicate details, like the back and forth of the pianos on “Wake and Be Fine” or the keyboard pulse of “White Shadow Waltz.” At this point, Okkervil River aren’t likely to be making left-field turns with their music. They don’t have the element of surprise anymore. But in I Am Very Far they’ve made an assured, confident album that plays to their strengths while expanding their scope.