Not everyone can feel deep, empathetic, inarticulable emotions when they listen to pop music. Actually, I'm pretty sure most people hate it when they have to deal with the histrionics, the florid prose, or the unendurable superciliousness of passionate fanatics who have felt deep, empathetic, inarticulable emotion when listening to pop music. They can't relate, after all.
I'm using ""pop"" in the most general way, here: ""pop"" music, as I see it, is just about the broadest term that can be applied to music. It's almost a redundant statement. The very fringes of the avant-garde, even, are usually inspired by the whirling cacophony of sounds, melodies, rhythms, clangs, and vibrations that bombard all of us. The world is not a silent, ordered place; pop music seeks to humanize and order the chaos of our natural environments - or it seeks to personify the metronymic order present in the mechanical - before it seeks anything else. The key word is ""humanize."" Mozart is pop music, and Lou Reed's ""Metal Machine Music,"" is pop music - both Mozart and ""MMM"" are many other, more descriptive things, but they're pop before they are anything else. I'm not just talking about the Beatles and Madonna alone, here.
I feel a mixture of sadness and envy when I think of people who don't feel deep, inarticulable truth when they listen to their favorite bands. My favorite bands create a sort of connectedness to the universal commonalities of human life, and an empathy for the particularities of the musicians contributing to the unconscious stream of universal commonalities I perceive in the music. I'm sad that there are people on this earth who don't feel the awe and revelation I do - sad that people can't access all the wonderful, empyreal feelings that I can. And I'm envious because it feels a bit silly, sometimes, to feel such overpowering emotions at the sound of guitar strums and Wuhrlizter wheezes. I'm envious of the people who never have to deal with any sadness or pain when they play their favorite records, of people who don't have to change the radio station when ""Wild Horses,"" by the Rolling Stones, comes on the radio, of people without raw, exposed nerve endings.
Will Robinson Sheff, raised in the northeastern United States but currently residing in Austin, TX, is the sort of guy who can feel deep, empathetic, inarticulable emotion when he listens to pop music, and he's the sort of guy who writes and sings songs about deep, empathetic, inarticulable emotion. Sheff never doubts the validity of those inarticulable emotions, and unlike me, he doesn't envy the people who don't feel this way.
Okkervil River is his band. He's something of a heroic Everyman to a small cult of blogging admirers, especially after Okkervil River's third record, Black Sheep Boy, was released nearly a year ago (Okkervil River is Sheff's primary musical project; he also plays and writes songs with Shearwater, as well as performing frequent solo concerts). Maybe that makes Sheff, and Okkervil River, sound a bit like Dashboard Confessional, if Chris Carraraba wasn't a inconceivably moronic person. Hopefully, it doesn't; Okkervil River (I'll abbreviate it OKR) isn't in the classic ""emo band"" template, anyway. Some people just call them ""alt.country"" because that's a close enough categorization for OKR's sound: lots of acoustic guitars, rudimentary folk chord progressions, some sporadic use of pedal steel and mandolin, and a bit of similarity in the vocal style Jeff Tweedy (of Wilco) employes. The observant indie-kid might hear Bright Eyes, Neutral Milk Hotel, Wilco, and maybe Ryan Adams in OKR's sound, and he'd be mostly right.
Okkervil River, and to a lesser extent Shearwater, are (to me) something greater than the sum of their influences, though; trying to shoehorn a genre on such individual creations is something of a futile act. Okkervil River and Shearwater have their own individual idiosyncrasies in their instrumental arrangements, and those idiosyncrasies are so lovable that each would still be pretty great even without Sheff's lyrics or vocal delivery. On the most recent Shearwater record, Palo Santo, I can even test this hypothesis, because it is the first Shearwater release without a song written and performed by Sheff - and I like Palo Santo quite a bit.
Sheff, however, is what I tune in for. His lyrics cackle with energy, and his performance is something otherworldly. He's got a bit of Leonard Cohen in him, a bit of Skip James, a bit of Jeff Mangum, but he's his own man. A screaming, spittle-dripping, maniac of a man, sometimes, but his own man nonetheless.
I first heard Okkervil River way back in 2002. Sheff used to write record reviews and other articles for Audiogalaxy, a peer-2-peer service that eventually morphed into Rhapsody. As far as I can tell, I was the only person who actually read those articles, before searching for Zeppelin songs. Why, it was Sheff's writing that introduced me to Neutral Milk Hotel.
Black Sheep Boy, along with the Black Sheep Boy Appendix EP, is the first record to challenge Neutral Milk Hotel's In An Aeroplane Over The Sea importance in my life. Not enough time as passed, I suppose, to definitively state that ""Black Sheep Boy"" will not lose it's luster as time passes, like Interpol's Turn on the Bright Lights has (at least, in my estimation). But now it has been over a year since I first procured an early leak of the record over the internet, and exactly a year since I saw OKR open for the Decembrists, and 8 months or so since I saw OKR at the Doug Fir in their first national tour as headliners, and 6 months since the Appendix was released - and I'm still listening to the damn thing every day.
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Man, I used to be able to write. Sigh.
