- 20
- Jul
The Stage Names is Okkervil River's fourth full-length. More importantly, though, it's the follow-up to Will Sheff and company's most acclaimed album, 2005's Black Sheep Boy and subsequent spin-off, the Black Sheep Boy Appendix EP. We liked the Overboard & Drown EP, too, but it was the former, really, that signaled the longstanding Austin band's apex, inspiring some surefire Lou Reed fandom. Lifting the curtain on this new nine-song affair, Sheff's crafted more upbeat, less ragged tunes and instead of secret messages in radio transmissions, he's focusing on the silver screen, the images that flicker on and in front of it.
We love the endless rhymes, extended metaphors/journeys, and smarty-pants playfulness. Excellent closer "John Allyn Smith Sails" finds Okkervil one-upping the Hold Steady on the John Berryman tip with a mini-biopic that offers more details about the poet's life than Finn musters on "Stuck Between Stations." (John Allyn Smith was Berryman's given name before his mother remarried.) Sheff takes the P.O.V. of Berryman before and after his suicidal leap onto the frozen Mississippi river -- "From a bridge on Washington Avenue, the year of 1972, broke my bones and skull and it was memorable" – but mixes in details about Berryman's father's suicide, earlier flirtations with death, academia, the funeral, etc. Sheff wins the smooth transition of the month award for concluding uproariously by shifting into "John B Sails"/"The Sloop John B," transforming this John B. into a Beach Boy or sailor instead of a dead 'n' frozen poet.