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Okkervil River’s songs frequently hinge upon moments of quiet, yet staggering epiphany. Whether grounded in outright and incomprehensible brutality (the senseless murder of “Westfall” or the crimes of “The War Criminal Rises and Speaks”) or the intensely personal (“Red” or “Yellow”), Will Sheff strips the moments of the grandiosity of pain or horror in favor of delivering us to the point where meaning breaks down, where the fictions upon which we have built our lives and even society, crumble. Most impressively, Sheff’s songs do this without judgment, without an overt condemnation or even sympathy, but rather a powerful, literary empathy that allows him to consume his characters. The Stage Names, however, is something a bit different. Although the songs emerge from or are brought to those same moments of deconstruction, the group’s fifth full-length almost playfully dismantles the drama of the Drama, a self-conscious and blatant entangling of the real and fabricated. As Sheff sings across the punchy riffs of “Unless It’s Kicks,” “What gives this mess some grace unless it’s fictions – unless it’s licks, man, unless it’s lies or it’s love?” The fiction is the reality is the fiction.
With 2005’s Black Sheep Boy, Okkervil River brought its vision to its hardest, and darkest, limits. The insatiable need for understanding and control in the face of irrevocable transgressions, as with “Black,” is destructively turned back on oneself in the inability to recast the past. The Stage Names, while moving at a much poppier clip, projects and digests simultaneously, blurring the lines between a voyeuristic detachment and localized empathy. As the opening track suggests in its title alone, “Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe,” the point of identification is doubled and ultimately becomes meaningless anyway: “It’s just a life story, so there’s no climax. No more new territory, so pull away the IMAX.” The fade in and out continues with “A Hand to Take Hold of the Scene,” visions shifting in a dreamlike montage until the reference of internal and external emotion or reality is indistinguishable. Sheff weaves his lines through so many allusions and connections made in a solipsistic indulgence that following the threads of narrative is nearly impossible. Most of the songs are more impressionistic or stream-of-consciousness than they are direct, like films spliced together in an indecipherable sequence. Yet in almost Joycean fashion, the themes reemerge throughout, stringing together the album with a balance of concept or, at least, conceit.
Despite the generally faster and more upbeat character of The Stage Names, with the exception of the opening songs Sheff’s characteristic hysterical outbursts are generally restrained into a more melodic and smoother singing that accentuates the poignancy of the disillusion. Musically, the album glides with a surprising cohesiveness given its new directions and liberal instrumentation. While the opening track crashes in an orchestrated wreck of piano keys and guitar, the horns and handclaps accenting the funky beat of “A Hand to Take Hold Of the Scene” and the gently ahhing, high-pitched background vocals complimenting the bounce of “You Can’t Hold the Hand of a Rock and Roll Man” almost ironically contradict Sheff’s caustic lyrics.
Just as Black Sheep Boy used Tim Hardin’s life and death as the (very) rough concept to build upon, The Stage Names seems to often tie together through the loss of self in the embracing of glamorized fictional excess, be it through the “Hollywood Babylon” of “Title Track” or the hangers-on of “A Girl in Port” and “Plus Ones,” the latter riffing through a barrage of lines from pop music history to suggest that the woman’s emotions have become merely an amalgam of rehashed feelings, with herself just adding one extra number (“100th luftballoon,” “51st way to leave your lover,” “9 miles high,” etc). All of the album’s characters seem to be leading double lives, often unconsciously, and are here brought to that moment of unmasking breakdown. The disconnect is nowhere more powerful than in “Savannah Smiles,” a soft, chime-laden ballad spinning on the moment a mother reads her daughter’s diary, as a mechanical clock clicks a metronomic pulse behind Sheff’s quaking voice. (It’s been suggested by the always-diligent fans on Okkervil’s message board that this song is in part a reference to the porn star Shannon Wilsey, who took her stage-name from the film Savannah Smiles. If so, she encapsulates well the almost necessary faith instilled in a fiction that serves as The Stage Names backdrop).
The album culminates thematically with the closing track “John Allyn Smith Sails,” as Sheff embodies the brilliant and self-destructive poet John Berryman in a Dream Song that digs its heels into the very fabric of art drawn from life, recounting in Berryman’s voice his father’s suicide and the moment of his own. Once again Okkervil leaves the song lingering on that moment of epiphany, where the past comes back as an irrepressible revenant to portend the present moment - the poet’s suicide by jumping from a bridge, which is here brought to bear in an almost mocking reworking of “Sloop John B,” with Jonathan Meiburg’s soaring refrain crescendoing in the distance. The entire album presents moments of complete and utter break-down, when the make-up is removed and we see ourselves for who we are. And yet there is a sly slant to Sheff’s lines set against the frolicking tunes that suggests we simply can’t take it all so seriously. After all, disillusion can’t set in without our first having invested ourselves in believing the illusion.
Mp3 from The Stage Names:
Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe
Websites:
www.okkervilriver.com
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