If All We're Taught Is A Trick? - Okkervil River "I Am Very Far"

For many a long year now I have had an end of year tradition - to peruse the music press best of lists and pick something totally unheard of at random and buy it. It's taken a bit of a diversion in this Spotify-ed and Grooveshark-ed days, as you can just about listen to everything going, but this used to be a wonderfully exciting trip into the unknown, sometimes yielding fine results, sometimes....not so much.

The best result I ever had was the semi-accidental finding of Okkervil River. I had a free download voucher for a specific mp3 site, and the first couple of things I picked out weren't available through that particular provider. One of the guys who wrote for www.twistedear.com had OR's The Stage Names on their best of the year list, and they were there on screen. The die was cast. Best. Click of a weblink. Ever.

From devouring their entire back catalogue within weeks, I then had to wait a while until 2008 semi-sequel album The Stand Ins, which whilst far from poor, actually delivered the first sense of being less than whelmed I had experienced with the band. However, the wonderful Roky Eriksson collaboration True Love Cast Out All Evil, the noises-off about a more expansive, more exploratory bent to forthcoming recordings, and then finally the preview non-album tracks Mermaid , Weave Room Blues and Walked Out On A Line have all combined to make this my most anticipated record of 2011. Boy am I setting myself up for a fall.....

Huzzah! Instead we get an album with the darkness and intrigue of Black Sheep Boy, but with a wider and more confident musical palette - not in the usual sense of a band sticking a mariachi track and something in waltz-time on just to appear to have depth, but in a way which suggests real growth and a desire to move forward in a sustainable way rather than anything short term-ist.

Funnily enough, the start is slightly inauspicious ; The Valley takes a bit of time to weave itself into coherence (though once it gets there its one of those great album openers that bears little resemblance to the rest but in doing so sets the whole up perfectly), and Piratess has that sense of ok-ness that inbued The Stand Ins, with it's slightly anaemic bass line going a little bit nowhere. Yet this is but a preamble, a warm up for the treats to come.

Things really kick off - proper - with Rider, a monstrous juggernaut of layered guitars, chiming piano and soaring, aggressively melodic vocals, a massive 46 (apparently) guitars in unison, but the result is a purely powerful grace rather than just force of numbers. Further exercises in careering abandon can be found in the Roxy circa-72 White Shadow Waltz with it's slightly off centre drums and motorik groove, whilst Wake And Be Fine throws a sub-Dylan vocal throwdown over more big drums and junkshop rhythms.

The album revolves around two central highlights - We Need A Myth starts like an old 60's girl group tune would with dramatic, cinematic strings, and then moves into a monolithic climax, redolent of the preacher-Sheff of The War Criminal Rises And Speaks or Another Radio Song. This is then counterpointed by the aching, doleful Hanging From A Hit, which employs those wonderful muted, drifting brasses they use so well.....all warm fires, Christmas (in May), Dickens and Colliery Brass Bands...all allied to Sheff's wonderfully twisted lyricism -

"I can hear her sigh, as she's almost asleep on one side, I lie back on my pillow, and ask what her husband is like...".

The lyric is another one of his ruminations of fidelity / infidelity, with the 'her' of the song then going on to declare that despite the ongoing tryst, her core remains elsewhere:

"I lie, reclined where the room is quiet, and it's quiet at night. The soft silk is fine and the waves are white, but the wind has died without him.

...And she says, And I ignite inside and I flash with fire and I limp from life and I'm blazing blind and I'm surging live and give up my mind when with him."

Lay Of The Last Survivor is another lighter moment, gently countryfied and augmented with woodwinds, whilst Your Past Life As A Blast revolves around an acoustic riff that evokes - no shit - George McCrae's Rock Your Baby. Things close with The Rise, lending an elegant stately air to the embers of the record, gently resting after the adrenalin rushes of earlier.

The semblance of fallibility that The Stage Names illuminated has actually given me the critical distance to appreciate this record more. It is their best record by far, as it both grounds the essence of the band and at the same time stretches it to new heights. Sheff's lyrical and melodic sensibilities have been joined by a production dexterity which belies the heavily layered instrumentation of the record. There are snatches of the trademark OR sound, but I Am Very Far is truly a step beyond. If I hear another record as good as this in 2011, then truly I am a lucky boy.