Okkervil River
I Am Very Far (Jagjaguwar)Welcome to Will Sheff’s double fantasy, a sprawling 2-LP opus complete with a stand-alone lyric book. Okkervil River’s seventh full-length was reportedly cut in short, chaotic sessions, at times featuring two of everything (drummers, bassists, pianists) and up to seven guitarists, with Sheff obsessively editing and overdubbing. Perhaps as a result, I Am Very Far is the local indie folk outfit’s most divisive and difficult work to date. The group leader’s more-is-more production worked miracles on Roky Erickson’s 2010 comeback, True Love Cast Out All Evil, on which every detail summoned a different ghost from the past. Here, with shackled opener “The Valley” and manic “Wake and Be Fine,” Sheff, like local contemporaries Bill Callahan and Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam, hits the proverbial brick wall, then decides to throw everything against it to see what sticks. The experiment pays off in the moody, electro-swoon of “Piratess” and exquisitely stringed plea of “We Need a Myth,” but the more refined moments – the Americana bent of “Lay of the Last Survivor” and lingering piano ode “Hanging From a Hit” – leave a stronger impression. Too often the album sounds like a modern version of Death of a Ladies’ Man, Leonard Cohen’s soiree with Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, as in the massive “Rider” and the relentless swell of “White Shadow Waltz.” Lyrically, I Am Very Far mirrors the dark catharsis of 2005’s Black Sheep Boy – fractured, oblique narratives sketched with novel sophistication – yet more closely resembles the Black Sheep Boy Appendix. It’s a scattershot collection of rougher material, lacking the concision and continuity that made 2003’s Down the River of Golden Dreams and 2007’s The Stage Names such defining works.
This article appears in May 13 • 2011.