Okkervil River

The Stand Ins (Jagjaguwar)

By Anna Breshears
Published: September 2nd, 2008 | 9:00am

Okkervil River’s fifth full-length, The Stand Ins, is fittingly billed as a sequel to last summer’s The Stage Names: Once again, Will Sheff and company play incurably flawed characters starring in film-as-record vignettes set to urbane, rootsy rocknroll. Okkervil River’s crawl out of the Austin, Texas scene to “mid-level” status has not been without its sacrifices, as Stage Names and Stand Ins articulate: Making money from one’s art yields the Catch 22 alluded to in the opening lines of “Blue Tulip” — “They’re waiting to hate you / So give them an excuse / They say that / It changed you / I know that can’t be true.”

Living the nomadic life of a musician on the search for new material and under pressure to be “on” for fans isn’t easy, yet Sheff is equally conscious of looking like an asshole for complaining about it. Hence, Okkervil’s tendency to give up the goods via pop hooks and smart guitar licks, while simultaneously poking fun at themselves for giving people what they want. On “Pop Lie,” Sheff sneers at “Words and music calculated / To make you sing along / With the stereo on,” while doing exactly that with an indulgent medley of hand claps, chunky chords, and explosive drums.

Similarly, in the crisp “Singer Songwriter,” Sheff indicts a dilettante-ish artist with a lineage of money and talent, scolding, “You’ve got taste / What a waste / Because that’s all that you have,” in his reflective warble-wail before admitting wearily in “On Tour With Zykos” that he watched a TV movie when “I was supposed to be writing the most beautiful poems.”

With The Stand Ins, Okkervil River details its quest to find something real in the bizarre meta-life of the professional band, the tale of its journey flanked by clever melodies and cymbal crashes. And in the end, though Sheff might be — like the hero of album closer “Bruce Wayne Campbell” — “sick with singing the same songs in bars,” the disorderly outro proves that Okkervil River has the energy and desire to keep on rocking for yet another day.

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