The songs on this album were written during a turbulent period in the life of Okkervil River mainstay Will Sheff. He says that "this record was me taking my life back to zero and starting to add it all back up again".
Along with the passing of his beloved grandfather, another reason for the Texan singer's intense soul searching is the departure of band members. In this regard, I can't help feeling he must take some of the responsibility. Forming a parallel band, Shearwater, is not exactly an act of loyalty to the Okkervil River franchise.
Whatever the circumstances, the upshot is that on this record there is a whole new backing band together with orchestration composed by Nathan Thatcher and performed by the classical group yMusic. Apparently Marissa Nadler also helped out on vocals but, if so, her presence is so discreet as to be non existent.
The root and branch changes to the band's line-up go some way to explaining why the opening track has the melodramatic title Okkervil River R.I.P.. The implication is that using the band name for what is essentially a solo turn could be challenged under the trades descriptions act.
This mock obituary has the kind of weary fatalism that you also find in Wilco's Via Chicago. Like that track, it's something of slow burner that builds to a dramatic climax and ends with Sherr belatedly reassuring the listener that "I didn't open up my mouth just to piss and moan".
Pissing and moaning is, nevertheless, a fairly strong element of the album. In spite of all the 'woe is me' laments over the course of 9 songs and 57 minutes, Sherr never gets much closer to naming what or who is causing such distress.
Strength and vision are in short supply. In The Industry he admits to feeling he is up "against something so big and abstract that I can't tell what it is".
Six of the nine tracks are near to, or over, 7 minutes long and are very wordy treatises on dislocation and alienation. It's tempting to feel that a little creative editing is in order but he is clearly the kind of guy who will not use three or four words when a couple of thousand would easily do.
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While a similarly expansive Mark Koselek manages to maintain an ironic detachment from the world around him, Sherr seems bound up with the difficulty of putting his fragile emotional state into perspective.
The image I have is of a tortured soul, filling countless notebooks and fretting endlessly about why he feels so lonely and lacking in direction.
This is borne out by finding that Frontman In Heaven was the net result of an obsessive three-day, 14 hour period of writing while the lyrics to Days Spent Floating (In TheHalfbetween), the closing track, is made up of a series of lines that came into his head upon waking and includes the surreal image of a "sky of warm toast".
Love songs serve as welcome distractions to all this navel gazing but, as you would expect, these are not simple boy meets girl numbers. On Call Yourself Renee he declares with a wimpy air "I want to make it nice again" and on Judey On A Street he sounds like a nerdy Lou Reed.
On other tracks, Comes Indiana Through The Smoke is an anthem for the battleship his grandfather served on during WWII and Mary On A Wave examines the feminine aspect of God.
The songs undoubtedly derive from genuine emotions but the delivery is so overwrought that even those who sympathize with Sherr's distraught condition will need the patience of a saint to hear him out for almost an hour.
Okkervil River's website
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