A Look Inside The World Of Dreams - Down The River Of Golden Dreams by Okkervil River

People often ask me, especially as a non-musician, why - indeed HOW - music can get under your skin so much, how a particular record can inhabit you, and how it can just bloody MATTER so much. I don't know. I don't care. It just can. I know it's wrong to think that anyone who puts music on 'in the background' should be asbo'd, but I am what I am, and apparently what I am needs no excuses.

Perhaps it's because when the music gets you, it always gives you an answer - the question doesn't have to be a hugely poignant one, but the answer it gives you just makes sense. Okkervil River could easily be lumped in with a slew of alt/indie/country/rock bands, their sonic template provides little that is revolutionary. Of course I won't be the first person to note that the lyrics and impassioned vocals of Will Sheff, allied to his mesmeric melodies, raise this band above pretty much anything, but that doesn't make it any less true. These are songs recounting stories erstwhile to Sheff's life itself, but he imbues all with an empathic passion which fully draws their wider, more universal meaning out.

My personal most favourite thing about Sheff is that, like the best writers in any genre, he is utterly unconstrained. When my revolution is complete, no-one will be allowed to commit their words to music until terms such as caesura and enjambment are fully understood, until they realise that the song should fit the words and not the other way round. Sheff's lyrics are not poetry, but they are poetic in their construction - not every single phrase is a singular statement or built to fit in with any notional verse structure, you might have to wait a few bars until the point unfolds. Lines like

"Let’s go back up to your house and take our clothes off, and just push and pull ourselves until we’re deep inside of sleep, and with your body next to me, its sleepy sighing sounds like waves upon a sea too far to reach." (Seas Too Far To Reach)

aren't crammed into the usual musical schematic, but allow the images time to paint their pictures fully. Finding sexual metaphors in pop music isn't exactly hard ; finding one which truly evokes an emotional connection as this one does is rarer. Similarly, the song/story Yellow includes the following image which I'm sure Chris Martin would naturally split into four of the most banal rhyming couplets imaginable:

"For all of these things well I truly believe them, our paths and our futures are hidden in mists, that are stretching out over impossible distances, totally obscured, and I really do think that there's probably more good than anger or selfishness, sickness or sadness would ever completely allow us to have in this life, I think I'm sure, but that doesn't mean it's bad...."

This is a verse - in a pop song. The 'moon / june' train has left the station and we're still on the platform with the drizzle in our eyes. We are through the looking glass, hearing songs about loves lost, loves abandoned, but also about love's decisions, and how intricate and difficult they can be, how there's no such thing as a right answer, that there are always tributaries not adequately investigated. It Ends With A Fall is replete with images of decisions and choices made and not made, and the consequences of both, of the eternal truth that none of us know 'what makes love die or grow', and yet how that doesn't excuse the fact that getting it wrong can indeed end with a fall.

It has often been said that the lyric of The Velocity Of Saul At The Time Of His Conversion is either a dream or an acid trip - either may be so - but lines like 'and I feeling older pull off to the shoulder, and wonder with my head in my hands, should I call my wife, and say enough you and I, enough of the fight, enough of 'prevail' and 'walk in the light',

sound utterly real and not in any way detached from a reality despite wonderful imagery such as in the lines 'In my new dream the light's shining on me, little needles of sodium unstitch the seams of the sky'.

Much the same can be said of many of the lyrics, suggesting Sheff is a humanis t above all else -

"And my mother once said Son, remember this, no matter what someone did: that they once were just a kid at breast and in bib, in blanket and crib. So just reach inside yourself and find the part that still needs help, find that part in someone else and you'll do good" (Blanket And Crib)

"But let’s gather up your friends and drive up to that country inn. We can stay there, feeling water warmly wash across our skin, giving back all of our tears so that we can cry them again". (Seas Too Far To Reach)

Maine Island Lovers deals with infidelity, and whilst it is stark in its portrayal, the subject is no less dextrously handled as a result of that -

"When you walked out on her love was it easy? When I left him while sleeping was I dreaming? We take each night’s journey to the hotel in a hurry, where we love without worry on a bed that’s five days dirty. And we read without irony from a book my husband bought for me."

Sheff also reveals the inherent cynicism of infidelity ; this laying bare perfectly fits the sparse arrangement of the song musically:

"Because when I look in my future, I don’t see you and don’t wish to. Idle talk made when I’m lying by your side on some Maine island is too funny to me, honey, so let’s drop it. If you really want to love me, well, then do it. "

Sitting within all these ruminations is The War Criminal Rises And Speaks, a fascinating examination of our responses to and perceptions of 'evil'. The very fact of whether the character depicted in the song is actually a 'war criminal' in the standard sense is not the point. The interest is more in the judgements and justifications made on both sides, and how we use our moral compass in relation to someone in that situation who is trying to find a voice for themselves within that wider moral compass. Is it possible for either him or ourselves to 'learn of some truth that might be inside reported crimes'? The media sensationalises, so we often see a certain version of events, but with the prism of hindsight, how are we to see the man who carried out hideous acts in the name of war perhaps decades before? Do we hang on to the secondary evidence, the reported version of events? Sheff at least gives voice to the 'criminal' -

"Now he’s rising and not denying. His hands are shaking, but he’s not crying. And he’s saying “How did I climb out of a life so boring into that moment? Please stop ignoring the heart inside, oh you readers at home! While you gasp at my bloody crimes, please take the time to make your heart my home: where I’m forgiven by time, where I’m cushioned by hope, where I’m numbed by long drives, where I’m talked off or doped. Does the heart want to atone?

Oh, I believe that it’s so, because if I could climb back through time,I’d restore their lives and then give back my own"

One feels the desire for atonement is real, but the moral distance we always put between ourselves and others in this situation is clearly depicted:

"But the news today always fades away as you drive by, until at dinnertime when you look into her eyes, lit by evening sun - that, as usual, comes from above that straight, unbroken line, the horizon its rising is a given, just like your living.

Your heart’s warm and kind. Your mind is your own. Our blood-spattered criminal is inscrutable; don’t worry, he won’t rise up behind your eyes and take wild control. He’s not of this time, he fell out of a hole. "

We can pass judgement, one way or another, but even if we allow for atonement, we still keep a moral distance, we still convince ourselves we would never do anything like that even in extreme circumstances, so sure are we in our moral certainty. We still sleep so very well at night.

Down The River.... wasn't the first Okkervil River album I heard, but it has in the relatively short time I have been aware of them, had the most impact on me. It was the one that made me move from 'Okkervil River are really good' to friends and family asking me to 'just SHUT UP about Okkervil-Arseing-River!'. I couldn't have written this album, but I could have dictated some of it. Sheff has such a command of the language, an evocative lyrical voice of such depth that you are taken on a journey into yourself, himself, every self. And there is a grace to the record - by which I mean it would be too easy to make everything slow, heavy and self consciously 'deep', but even more strident tunes have a lightness to their power, ballads have an intensity that carries you rather than burdening you.

In some ways Down The River.... marks the last OR album that doesn't have a power pop classic in its realm ; that's not to say everything is of a slow pace, but there's no Black, The Latest Toughs, Unless Its Kicks or Pop Lie on here. Where the tempo increases the tone is still acoustic, with wists of bluegrass and country. The coronet / violin / accordion / banjo / acoustic guitar mix provides some instrumental passages on tracks such as Dead Faces or Song About A Star that find the same hairs-on-end place found in the instrumental coda to Fairytale Of New York, and create similar feelings to those you get from listening to records like Astral Weeks. Down The River Of Golden Dreams is one of those albums that deals in uncomfortable truths, difficult and sometimes savage emotions, but always does so with a delicate precision. The unwavering beauty of the melodies provides a sumptuous backdrop for these stories of the most elemental forms of human emotion.