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| Biography- (From Allmusic.com) | by Mario Mesquita Borges |
| Combining folk-rock inspirations and alternative rock sways, Okkervil River creates a particular visionary sound, strongly founded on dark and profound lyrics and on chaotic visions of patterned sound compounds. Okkervil River is a mutual project of Will Robison Sheff (vocals, guitar), and Seth Warren (drums), born when both were still in high school, in Meriden, NH. After several years and multiple life experiences, at the end of the ’90s the duo eventually decided to reassemble the band, by then with an extended lineup, after they both relocated to Austin, TX. Following the addition of Zachary Thomas (vocals, bass), Jonathan Meiburg (vocals, banjo), and drummer Mark Pedini, Okkervil River reappeared. In 1998, the group offered their first and self-released disc, the EP Bedroom, followed a year later by Stars Too Small to Use, the band’s debut album. During the succeeding years, the band regularly played live on numerous occasions, including an appearance at the South by Southwest festival in 2000. Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See, the group’s second album, showed up in 2002, followed by Down the River of Golden Dreams in 2003, reaffirming the band’s cult all over the Texas music scene. The band found success outside of their home state with 2005’s Black Sheep Boy and Black Sheep Boy Appendix EP, with 2007’s excellent Stage Names widening the playing field even more. | |
While solo-acoustic pioneers without backing bands have been on the outs since Cat Stevens lost his mind to Islam and the disgustingly, dehumanistic hipster play that is “Holocaust-Denial”, lead singer of Austin, Texas’ own alt-starkly illuminated folk mind, Will Scheff, harbors a literary reluctance to chop a thought into sentence fragments and knowledge of film provides the ideal projection of real life granted you are no less than… let’s say 18 years of age, a few credits short of an English/Creative writing doctorate degree, a healthy outlook on the world, and a grasp of the sphere of exaggerated situations with no intention of making his life or writing an amalgamation of impressionable from-good-family fans thoughts, but crafted allusions to the overall themes of with moments of distress, transcendence, and the austerely disillusioned irony of life, death, loves, and loves lost… some of them the bands close friends.
1. Okkervil River- “Red”- Will Sheff Solo @ Brattle Theatre 7/13/07
Lyrics/Novellette:
Red is my favorite color, red like your mother’s eyes after awhile of crying about how you don’t love her. She says “I know I don’t deserve supervised sight of her, but each day becomes a blur without my daughter.” Fall is my favorite season, like falling to reasoning why you crashed from on high. She says “Why is my life so uneven, and what have I done right but given you your life if after I led you on into that bar room?” “Yes” is my favorite answer. I took a dancer home, she felt so alone. We stayed up all night in the kitchen doing my dishes, on and on until the dawn. She said “I know it’s easy to have me, but I have seen some things that I can’t even tell to my family pictures,” and “I’m full of fictions and fucking addictions” and “I miss my mother.” She’ll never know I could never forget her. If I could write her a letter, I’d try with every line to say “She still remembers your touch. And I know that it’s not much, but you still haven’t lost.
“Red”-Memphis 04/06/08
Just like the American outlaws who pioneered the wild west and bolstered its hindsight storytelling prowess with tales of whiskey, women, blood, molaria, and beer: red is Scheffs favorite color. As many of their fans might contest to that choice of color while they make their way to the bathroom to get a paper towel to wipe off a seasonal nose-bleed.. many of these songs, as well as the ones on the later albums, portray a vivid picture of the drug abuse, loneliness, and the state of modern society as an inseperable whole. For some reason, through Scheff’s inescapable talent for creating beautiful poetry that borders on a leaflet passed around during the Russian revolution, I can’t help but picture him peer-editing some “cutters” poetry in a class with markings in the margins the likes of “c-grade sadness”, “Toto-transcendance”, or “get some better drugs and friends”. Who knows? Not judging, but his lyrics definitely require some cerebral spatial and engineering to understand. In the debut track, the protagonist meets a basketcase stripper who has apparently left her daughter with her mother in hopes of clear-plastic heel success in the big time that is professional dancing in a venue that smells like sexual predators and four dollar “rails”. Although the main
2. Dead dog song-
Sam, bless him, has died and left this home, the woodchucks running wild, the bushes overgrown. Slip unseen into the skein of trees, slide through dusky grasses and scatter his ashes. It’s all over, he’s never coming back. There’ll be no more roaming. He was only here for fourteen years, and now the branches scratch my face and I can’t hold back my tears. Long ago I’d see him running in the snow, he’d come in from the cold and he’d lie down by the stove. Pass along this loping road, the needley grasp of briars on the slope. He’d never been to church, so he doesn’t have a soul. He isn’t waiting at the place where all of us will go. But the woodchucks wouldn’t run so wild, the bushes wouldn’t be so overgrown if we were not alone. Bound unbound through the boundless air, remaining wisps of hair. Barking out through everywhere, the trees, the grass, the rain, and Sam in the air. He was in this world, by my side he was curled, but he came uncurled and this world holds him that much ti
Whereas self-righteous misconstrued Christianity teaches us that man has dominion over animals, logic and trips on the cosmic-snake teach us that often times we forget about our bodies to the point where we think shitting isn’t disgusting in any way.
Westfall-
The Parish Austin, TX 9/16/06
“Westfall” (Live Rice University)
I’m surrounded, each doorway covered by at least twenty men. And they’re going to take me and throw me in prison. I ain’t coming back again. When I was younger, handsomer and stronger, I felt like I could do anything. But all of these people making all these faces didn’t seem like my kith and kin. Colin Kincaid from the twelfth grade, I guess you could say he was my best friend. He lived in a big tall house out on Westfall where we would hide when the rain rolled in. We went out one night and took a flashlight, out with these two girls Colin knew from Kenwood Christian. One was named Laurie, that’s what the story said next week in the Guardian. And when I killed her it was so easy that I wanted to kill her again. I got down on both of my knees and….she ain’t coming back again. Now, with all these cameras focused on my face, you’d think they could see it through my skin. They’re looking for evil, thinking they can trace it, but evil don’t look like any.
“Westfall” Pabst Theater, Milwaukee Wisconsin 9/17/07.
In an American Psycho context, Westfall contemplates the ideas of facades as a a poor indicator of a humans potential for ruthlessness. While the twang and proficiency of Okkervil River as a sleek, tumble-weed thumping folk-country band is rightly deserved, they often trade in drunken, mindless lyrics for political and social commentary that is subtle and mature in comparison to those of Bright Eye’s Conor Oberst. While Bright Eyes seems more overtly political and childish in their scope of
lyrical ambition, Sheff seems to put himself into the mind of the antagonist who could very well in this case have been an allegory for the crop of unassuming school shooters that have peppered the American- tragedy landscape in the past decade. And while the media and modern muckrakers can think that they can put a face on tragedy, the irony in a gruesome death being reported in a paper called “The Guardian” is only rivaled by two killers who ended two Kenwood Christian alumnis lives
through meeting them through the most acceptable and trusting of mediums: church.
“There were these murder cases in Austin where these two girls were working in a yogurt shop and these three college guys went to rob the place and killed and mutilated them,” Sheff said. “I worked for the state at the time and heard the details they didn’t report — how they cut them open and filled them with frozen yogurt. They caught one of the kids that did it, and there he was, on TV, and I remember my co-workers looking at him and looking at him for the evil on his face. You wanted to see the evil, but it wasn’t there.”
The Yogurt Shop Murders was a case involving the murder of four teenage girls in a local yogurt shop in Austin, Texas. The murders occurred on December 6, 1991 where the shop was then set aflame. The bodies of Amy Ayers (13), Jennifer Harbison (17), Sarah Harbison (15) and Eliza Thomas (17) were subsequently discovered that night.
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