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The Stand Ins

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Okkervil River

 
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The Stand Ins
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Average: 4.5 (224 ratings)

On their bracing sixth record, Okkervil River spare no one, least of all themselves.

  • We Say...

    Review by J. Edward Keyes

    Billed as a sequel to last year's The Stage Names, the sixth record from Okkervil River, isn't so much a continuation as it is a further rumination on similar themes. Like its predecessor, The Stand-Ins is concerned with the travails of "some mid-level band," but where the protagonists in The Stage Names seemed to stumble dumbly and naively through their misfortunes ("A Girl in Port," in particular, bore the sting of regret), here the characters are harder and crueler and more calculated.

    The villains enter early: "Singer Songwriter" is a dead-on evisceration of the kind of privileged folkie that affects penniless bohemianism for the sake of image. Will Sheff's lyrics, which in the past had a tendency to sacrifice clarity for poetry, are agonizingly precise here: "I heard cuts by the Kinks on your speakers," he sneers, "I saw Poe and Artaud on your shelves/ While The Last Laugh's first scene/ On your flat-panel screen/ Lit Chanel that you wrapped 'round yourself." It's blistering and brutal, a 21st-century take on "Positively 4th Street." That the music is a spot-on evocation of Bringin' It All Back Home doesn't hurt. In fact, The Stand-Ins is best when it's buoyant: "Calling and Not Calling My Ex," which this writer would like to argue is about Chan Marshall (um, evidence to come) rolls along on a broad, brash folk strum as Sheff sighs, "She was once mine/ That smile that shines from the glossy magazine/ That's stuck inside the Sunday Times." "Pop Lie" is a hurricane, too, all bash and clatter and chugging Kinks riffs that take to task "the liar who lied in his pop song."

    If that last lyric sounds a bit unreasonable, that's one of The Stand-Ins only drawbacks. Sheff has a tendency to treat his artistic miscreants with a kind of acrid contempt, and periodically his declamations of musicians who dare to conduct themselves with anything other than total integrity can be a bit wearying. But if Sheff demands a lot of his creations, it's likely because he demands a lot of himself. On "Lost Coastlines" he howls "Every night finds us rocking and rolling on waves wild and white/ Where we have lost our way/ But no one will say it outright." Maybe that topic is fodder for Part III?

  • They Say...

    Review by James Christopher Monger, All Music Guide

    Okkervil River's 2007 almost-masterpiece Stage Names presented a vivid dissection of the "Silver Screen," both literally and metaphorically as filtered through the crowded, cerebral library of bandleader (and one-time film student) Will Sheff. 2008's Stand Ins doesn't just complement Stage Names (which was originally conceived as a two-disc package), it completes it. Opening with the first of three mini-instrumentals that sound like a mash-up of Bill Frisell's Nashville and Radiohead's Kid A, Stand Ins revisits many of the central themes (loneliness, failure, hero worship, and broken love) that bounced around the set of Stage Names. Songs like "Lost Coastlines" (a duet with former member and current Shearwater main man Jonathan Meiburg), with its Motown bassline, copious "la, la, la's," and "Old West" horn section, "Blue Tulip" with its slow-burn build and explosive finale, and "Singer Songwriter" with its lament that "This thing you once did might have dazzled the kids/but the kids once grown up are going to walk away" are all instant Okkervil classics, but it's the nearly six-minute closer that seals the deal. Like "John Allyn Smith Sails," Stage Names' ode to doomed poet John Berryman, "Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979," a tribute to gay glam rock icon Jobriath, who was adored and then devoured by the press in the mid-'70s before dying of AIDS in 1983 a poor lounge act, presents its subject as tragic, misunderstood, and buried beneath the weight of his accomplishments. It's a subject that suits Sheff's writing style well, flowing out like an Americana version of something off of Scott Walker's self-penned fourth album. Stand Ins glows a little less bright than its predecessor, but it shines nonetheless. There may be nothing as immediately satisfying as "Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe," "Plus Ones," or "Girl in Port," but it offers a more streamlined ride than Stage Names, wasting very little time trying to squeeze every last bit of scarlet pulp from the blood orange.

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