Artvoice: Buffalo's #1 Newsweekly
Home Blogs Web Features Calendar Listings Artvoice TV Real Estate Classifieds Contact
Previous story: The Vorticist & Chancellor
Next story: Review: Okkervil River - The Stand Ins

Beyond the LIterate Rock Laureate Shell of Okkervil River

Stand-Ins, Stage Names, and Pop Lies

It’s funny what a couple of hours can prove in rock and roll. A couple of hours and a couple of shows, actually…

On a sunny Texas Saturday in the middle of March, Will Sheff and his Austin-based band Okkervil River took to a tiny platform—maybe eight inches off the ground—standing beneath a tent. It was a makeshift venue, one of many erected during the week of the annual SXSW music festival. I think of it like an old-time tent revival, a particularly fitting image.

Okkervil River's Will Sheff at SXSW 2008. (photo by David L. Dewey)

In a beat-up suit jacket and rounded specs, Sheff cut the perfect form of the ragged, traveling preacher: meek and weary at first look, by the start of the show he had turned into a fiery, explosive presence at front and center.

Through five albums and a clutch of EPs and singles, Okkervil River have set themselves apart from the indie rock masses. While many of the band’s peers have proven to be Pitchfork-pandering, one-album-wonders, Okkervil has steadily built an impressive catalog on the back of carefully honed pop, lavish with intricate storytelling, recurring characters, able arrangements that flutter between hushed and folky and challenging art rock constraints.

The fact that it’s easy to get lost in the nuanced beauty of the band’s compositions is somehow cast off, though.

As clever, literate, and seemingly sensitive a songwriter as Sheff is, he cannily detours the preciousness and bedsit whine of someone like Conor Oberst. He and the band never forego the important underlying truth: It’s still rock and roll. They can play slinky, blue-eyed R&B and garage raveups as well as they do the quieter stuff.

And Okkervil proves itself a dynamo live.

Sheff commanded that tiny stage in Austin as the sun set on west Texas behind him. As the band tore through a set including a ferocious “Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe” and the exceptional anti-rock cliché curio “Plus Ones” (both from 2007’s album The Stage Names), four or five hundred onlookers were entranced and grew impassioned for what has to be one the finest American bands to appear in the new millennium.

Okkervil River proved their worth in front of a tiny crowd, but could they do the same in front of a much greater swirling mass?

With barely enough time to walk to the hotel and splash water on my face, I was headed for another show.

Dusk was settling in over the big, dusty backyard amphitheater behind the famed Stubbs BBQ. This time, instead of a few hundred people, there were thousands. Less than a couple hours from clearing their gear from the last show, the band was it again.

With the same unlikely adjunct of bravado and intimacy, Okkervil easily captured the amphitheater crowd the same way they had done under the tiny tent: with a lot of great songs and every bit of zeal they could muster.

Okkervil River brings their live show to the Tralf this Friday, October 10, at 8pm.

blog comments powered by Disqus