Austin Sound

In preparation of the release next week of The Stand Ins, Okkervil River has created a series of videos featuring some of their favorite artists covering songs from the album. Among those that are posted on their newly set-up Youtube page are Bon Iver doing “Blue Tulip”, David Vandervelde with “Singer Songwriter”, Bird of Youth offering “Pop Lie”, and Jack Ladder with “Starry Stairs.” There is also one with Will Sheff and the New Pornographers A.C. Newman trading vocals on “Lost Coastlines,” which we posted Okkervil’s mp3 of a few weeks ago. Watch the video below.

This week, Pitchfork premiered a preview (that’s a mouthful) of Okkervil River’s new album and The Stage Names sequel, The Stand Ins, which has subsequently been sweeping across the interwebs in anticipation of it’s September 9 release on Jagjaguwar. “Lost Coastlines” is easily one of the best songs from the new album, which, as big of Okkervil fans as we are around round, follows it’s predecessor fairly closely to the hip and doesn’t compare quite as well. Still there are some fantastic songs, like the download below.

Following up on the announcement that Okkervil River will be releasing the companion album to last year’s The Stage Names this September, the band has revealed the track listing as well as the cover art. Judging from the song titles, The Stand Ins seems to fall thematically in line with the previous LP, though we’re excited to here whatever the song “On Tour With Zykos” might have to offer!

The album art corresponds to the The Stage Names, apparently depicting the dreadful image of what’s going on with the body attached that hand sticking out of the water. Take a gander for yourself after the jump, as well as the tracklisting:

Following up last year’s extraordinary effort, The Stage Names, Okkervil River has announced they’ll have another album out this September 9. Called The Stand Ins, the album appears to be a sequel to their post-modern contemplations in the same vein as the Black Sheep Boy Appendix culled songs recorded for the original album that didn’t make the cut.

Is this really news? Well, kinda. Though Jonathan Meiburg, the angelic voiced frontman and songwriter for Shearwater, hasn’t played with Okkervil River for a while, he had never really left the group that he helped found with Will Sheff. In fact, as Sheff himself noted in our interview with him way back last year, Meiburg is all over Okkervil’s latest album.

We love the internet, being a part of it and all. But one of the things we love it for the most is that anyone with a camera and cool idea can get songs out of about any artist, producing some cool, unique little shows. Take Austin’s own Retread Sessions, for example.

One of our favorites is the Black Cab Sessions, a Brit-based project that throws artists in the back of a cab and gets them to play while trolling around London. That’s it. Nothing fancy, nothing complicated. Just a camera, a confiscated car, and an artist. But the results are pretty fantastic, especially given the talent that they’ve been able to coerce into the backseat.

Bracing for those awkward holiday thank yous for homemade sweaters and packs of tube socks? (Actually, we kinda appreciate the socks). Well, Okkervil River has ensured that your digital stocking will at least be filled with one treat you’ll appreciate this year by offering a free downloadable mixtape of songs culled from live performances over the past two years.

The nine songs on the Golden Opportunities Mixtape include one Okkervil original (”Listening to Otis Redding At Home During Christmas”), and covers ranging from Randy Newman’s wonderful “Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear” to John Cale’s “Antarctica Starts Here.” There is even a version of Serge Gainsbourg’s “I Came Here to Say I’m Going Away” translated from the French by Will Sheff himself.

The ballots for this year’s Plug Independent Music Awards are up and once again a number of Austin Bands are represented. The 2008 winners will be announced at the March 6 show in New York, and internet voting for fans lasts until February - so in the true democratic spirit, vote early and often.

This year’s local nominees include Spoon for best album with Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, which also gets a nod for best indie album alongside Okkervil River’s The Stage Names. Dallas’ St. Vincent (aka Annie Clark) comes up with nominations for both New Artist and Female Artist of the Year, as well as Video of the Year for “Jesus Saves, I Spend,” while new Dripping Springs resident Sam Beam is up for Male Artist of the Year and Americana Album for Iron and Wine’s The Shepherd’s Dog.

9/5/07
As if Okkervil River’s latest album The Stage Names wasn’t already riddled through a post-modern maze of identity, the video for their lead single “Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe” adds another allusion soaked layer to the narrative. Moving in and out of the television screen of a seedy hotel, Will Sheff and crew soundtrack scenes of suicide, porn, and disillusion in an increasingly unraveling hysteria. It’s a dark and powerful video, and stands as one of the best local productions yet this year.

The video was directed by Margaret Brown, well-respected for her excellent documentary about the appropriately tragic Townes Van Zandt, Be Here to Love Me, which was released in 2005. “Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe” is equally stunning. Check it out below.

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.