Okkervil River's Black Sheep Boy was one of the most acclaimed releases of 2005.
"Wordy and dense, prone to murder ballads, full of soft strings and Wurlitzers...both violent and bookish; it's a striking, woebegone work that...plays out like the strangest Cocteau movie you've probably never seen," wrote the Chicago Tribune.
Kelefa Sanneh wrote in the New York Times that: "Will Sheff, leader of the Austin indie-rock band Okkervil River, writes like a novelist."
Pitchfork's Stephen Deusner added, "like all good storytellers, Sheff is interested in conflict...and he has the uncommon and perhaps unenviable gifts for speaking fluently through his misery-heavy characters." This underdog of a record even managed to come to the attention of rock icon Lou Reed, who on the MTV Video Music Awards and in the Denver Post pronounced Okkervil River one of his favorite contemporary bands.
With their newest release, The Stage Names, Okkervil River dynamite the walls of Black Sheep Boy's gothic, moss-walled castle from the inside to let in the glaring sun. Where Black Sheep Boy presented a fairytale of dark babbling streams and high distant towers, The Stage Names ¨takes place in an unmistakably modern world, where snowy televisions blast into cheap hotels the spectral images of soap stars endlessly betraying each other, where losers in late-night bars languish to the beat of their favorite songs, where broken-down actresses place their final cell calls from lonely mansions high in the hills.
Riddled with characters real and fake, with true-life biography and brazenly fabricated autobiography, with the relics of high culture and the crumpled-up trash of low culture, The Stage Names is a cinemascopic take on the meaning of entertainment.
Reccomended for fans of:
Leonard Cohen, Leadbelly, Bright Eyes, Lou Reed, Incredibly Eloquent And Vivid American Indie Rock Songwriting
Photographs available here: http://www.jagjaguwar.com/press/okkervilriver/okkervilpress.php
Support:
Minotaurs
www.myspace.com/minotaurs
Anna Ternheim (sweden)
http://www.myspace.com/annaternheim
Tickets are £8.50 adv.
Click here for tickets for Okkervil River in Newcastle
No comments:
Post a Comment