Send "Okkervil River " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 I Am Very Far is ostensibly Okkervil River's first non-concept album in eight years. After Down the River of Golden Dreams in 2003, the Austin-based group released two sets of linked records: Black Sheep Boy and Black Sheep Boy Appendix both re-imagined Tim Hardin's title song as a phantasmagorical rock'n'roll cautionary tale, full of goat-headed men and hearts literally made of stone. The Stage Names and The Stand Ins played like two installments of a dark tour diary, deconstructing old rock myths and scrawling out new ones. Together, these four albums revealed frontman Will Sheff as one of indie rock's most ambitious thinkers: a romantic anti-romantic weighing highly literate lyrics against an endlessly bleak worldview.For all its bluster, however, 2008's The Stand Ins suggested Sheff's large-scale ideas were yielding diminishing returns. It was an impressive run that explored the edges of indie-rock songwriting and distinguished Okkervil River from so many of their peers, but it's refreshing that I Am Very Far is a collection of songs-as-statements rather than a collection-of-songs as statement. These 11 tracks sound more like stand-alone efforts rather than pieces of a larger puzzle, even if they do revisit and expound on many of Sheff's pet themes. The thundering war stomp of "The Valley"-- which opens the album like a pre-ritual incantation-- soundtracks a journey through "the valley of the rock'n'roll dead," which may be Sheff's idea of a summer festival. On "Hanging From a Hit", he's saved from the abyss by an earworm, then listens as his married lover describes her marriage: "I'm too much mine without him," she says of her husband. "I limp from life." These songs may be less grounded in familiar settings and predicaments than previous efforts, and therefore a bit more oblique, but lines like those quoted above can be hooks in themselves-- as catchy and sharp as choruses, sticking in your mind as you decode their ambiguities. As a result, Sheff's songs never truly sound settled but remain lively and prickly, especially as various images repeat throughout the album, motifs instead of concepts that suture these songs together. There's a throat in every track, either cut and open or bound to be cut: "A slit throat makes a note like a raw winter wind," he sings on "The Valley", adding to its visceral energy. Of course Jagjaguwar is releasing a small chapbook of lyrics as a promo item and part of the deluxe vinyl edition....full text |
| Guardian |
| Some albums take time, slowly revealing their meanings and aims only after repeated listening. Others seem to announce their intentions the moment you put them on, as does the sixth album by Texan quintet Okkervil River. It opens with a slightly archaic but nevertheless familiar sound: even 20 years after it fell from fashion, nothing says "we are aiming for the stadiums" quite like the booming thwack of a gated snare drum, the 80s sonic signpost of big rock music with big ambitions. Buy it from Buy the CD Download as MP3 Okkervil River I Am Very Far JAGJAGUWAR. 2011 On the one hand, it's just a sound, but on the other, it's such a legendary sonic cliche that it's hard not to think Okkervil River – fronted by a sometime music journalist, nothing if not knowing about rock music – are intentionally using it as a signifier. Its presence would fit with advance reports that I Am Very Far is the self-styled mid-level band's big push for Arcade Fire-style mainstream success. That said, you're never going to get the song it drives along confused with the oeuvre of REO Speedwagon. The Valley is an ungainly, occasionally discordant march, filled with fearsome visions about the music business. Almost the first thing you come across in the lyrics is a corpse: "Slicked-back bloody black gunshot to the head … fallen in the valley of the rock'n'roll dead." This is an image long-term fans might feel inclined to greet with a lovingly indulgent roll of the eyes and a sigh: uh-oh, here we go again. You could argue that the climate is currently good for slow-burning, bookish American indie bands looking to make a commercial leap – the Decemberists recently entered the US album charts at No 1 – but even so, Okkervil River seem improbable candidates for mainstream fame, not least because they've spent their last three albums wringing their hands about the very idea of mainstream fame. Black Sheep Boy, from 2005, was a concept album based loosely on the life of heroin-addicted folk singer Tim Hardin. The Stage Names (2007) found them agonising over the whys and wherefores of their songs appearing on TV dramas. By the time of I Am Very Far's immediate predecessor, The Stand-Ins, frontman Will Sheff was using the heartbreaking figure of glam rock flop Jobriath at the end of his life, "sick of singing" and dying of Aids, as dire warning of the record industry's ruinous effects. He seemed on the verge of talking himself out of a job: "This thing you once did might have dazzled the kids, but the kids once grown up are going to walk away," he noted glumly on a song called Singer Songwriter....full text |
| Cokemachineglow |
| “I am alone”—“je est un autre”—I Am Very Far. In the album’s title, there tussles a bold-faced, Rimbaudian anguish. And it is a bold, tussle-riddled album, this sixth from Okkervil River, filled to the brim and beyond with a theatrical display of effusive elements of such variety and viscera, they make war and make war unceasingly. Loudly. Unmistakably. It is an album that is nothing if not a veritable tower of warring, waltzing, rock and roll mattresses towering over a pea-sized question as to whether rock and roll even has a place here. Frontman Will Sheff comes off as the artist who succumbs to or suffers under the thumb of every variety of anguish and struggle under the sun. Even in the discourse outside the songs: struggle. In beating away terms like “literary,” “country,” “rock,” or even “violence”—having embraced all of the above and also having to defend all those qualities—in a lot of deliberation and defensiveness, Sheff carries on that virtuous wrestle with songwriting that’s so minuscule it’s almost impossible not to pick it out of where it’s hidden and inflate it into everything I’ve appreciated to date about Okkervil River. And then all these attributes seem to sprout in a really organic way from a really, believably, visceral core, lying at the center of a really, sincerely, visceral kind of artist. So visceral that it’s surprising just how guarded I Am Very Far sounds. It could be the unrelenting profusion of elements and cyclonic trials that give that impression, from the ambling waltz of “Hanging From a Hit,” to the assertive thrust and snare-accentuated crashes of highly declarative opener “The Valley,” to the almost Of Montreal-ish, brackish discotheque shuffle of “Your Past Life As a Blast.” Sheff, like Joseph Beuys’ performance wherein he locked himself up in a room for the better part of a week with a wild coyote, has isolated his pivotal push-and-pull essence in the massive content of the album. It’s…well, impenetrably epic in a way recent single “Mermaid” didn’t prepare me for....full text |
Okkervil River lyrics
