“Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe“
from the album The Stage Names
2007
iTunes
The Stage Names plays like a response to Okkervil River’s last album, the epic Black Sheep Boy; an effort by singer/songwriter Will Sheff to find a form of expression that moves beyond the cathartic darkness of what was the band’s best album to date.
The sound of this new work is bright. This is Okkervil River as a true rock band, reaching out to fully embrace pop music’s history. This is a compendium of Motown rhythms, post-punk drama, girl group harmonies, classic rock power, country charm, orchestral pop flourishes and folk music’s universal themes. No longer does the band merely hint at these influences; now they’ve completely embraced them.
In a sense, it’s a bold move. Over the course of the band’s previous albums, Sheff and company have created a catalog that, like the work of peers Bright Eyes, Neutral Milk Hotel and Arcade Fire, seems to revel in the strangeness of pain and unhappiness.
Sometimes their music has been a difficult mess to sift through. The lyrics read like Raymond Carver without the simplicity, sharing tales of people hurt or hurting others, characters that need that pain and need to give that pain. The music has been a folk-rock mess that easily conveys that same sense of pain and longing.
The Stage Names moves past these themes. The album is built like a collection of short stories, all with the same narrative structure as past albums, but without the complete embrace of darkness. Not that the sadness is gone, but these songs are a more complicated matter — songs that acknowledge the pain in life, while admitting that even with that pain, life is not hopeless.
There is a unity to the lyrics. Each of these songs seems to take the artist as its focus. Songs like “Plus One” and “You Can’t Hold the Hand of a Rock and Roll Man” question the motives and effects of music and its lifestyle.
Each song seems to point to Sheff and company searching for the meaning not just in life, but in what they’ve done to this point. It speaks to a band opening up the next chapter in their already impressive existence.