Okkervil River's Black Sheep Boy
Okkervil River’s “Black Sheep Boy”
Forced at gunpoint (or possibly just asked very nicely), I was to spend a good 3rd of July 4th weekend in an overcrowded Honda Civic. The car smelled of shoes and was obnoxiously emitting a deafening noise, which I was to later understand was called music. Despite the bad batch of Cinnabuns from a Maryland rest stop, my weekend roadtrip wasn’t all a masochist’s wet dream. After exhausting all other methods of entertainment, including two successively heated rounds of the license plate game, I decided that I should probably just give in and listen to my disc-man. Luckily for me the CD I had decided to bring along with me was Okkervil River’s Black Sheep Boy.
With an album cover that looked like a cross between Alice in Wonderland and a Todd Mcfarlane drawing, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I first inserted the crimson red disc and pressed play. The first song, “Black Sheep Boy”, was slowly piped into my earphones, sounding like shortened Elliot Smith outtake. At only 1 minute and 18 seconds long, before your body even adjusts to the melody, you’re launched into the rest of the album much as Alice is launched down the rabbit hole. By the second song, “For Real”, you immediately know you’re someplace as far from the fragile vocals and precious acoustic guitar of “Black Sheep Boy” as one could be. Gone are the Elliot Smithisms, replaced by a tension soaked soft/loud/soft guitar riff and the most frantic over the top vocals this side of Xiu Xiu. The rest of the album fits somewhere between Neutral Milk Hotel’s Aeroplane Over the Sea and a harder rocking My Morning Jacket.
Much like the strange demon adorning much of the CD’s jacket booklet, you feel that singer Will Sheff might be possessed. Throughout the album he exorcises some type of inner demons (most likely romantic) as he bleats, yelps, whispers. All the while you feel he’s frantically looking over his shoulder trying to judge the distance of his pursuing ghosts. Lyrics such as, “December’s lying near, but in the oven’s heat this house is now a home”, have an oddly time displaced quality to them. Not so much the purposeful retro vernacular of the Decemberists, it much more closely resembles the out of time lyrical model Neutral Milk Hotel set with Aeroplane Over the Sea. You can just sense the characters in each song yelling at each other and breaking down in tears on some dusty old porch. Much like the French New wave wasn’t consciously trying to romanticize its landscape, Okkervil River can’t seem to help but paint this extremely inviting southern background, both musically and lyrically, as a setting for its cries of pain. Like the Southern romanticism found on any Iron and Wine song, Okkervil River seems to unconsciously summon these southern fables with ease. All in all it makes for an excellent album unlike any other, except for perhaps the enigmatic Aeroplane Over the Sea. Much like that seminal album, the standout tracks on Black Sheep Boy are the rockers, in this case, “For Real” and “Black”.
After I finished listening to Black Sheep Boy in my friend’s car I was jettisoned back to reality. Its pains, trials and tribulations never as beautifully presented as on Okkervil River’s album. I might have might have made it out of Wonderland of Black Sheep Boy but I knew despite its inner demons I would be visiting again very soon.
Forced at gunpoint (or possibly just asked very nicely), I was to spend a good 3rd of July 4th weekend in an overcrowded Honda Civic. The car smelled of shoes and was obnoxiously emitting a deafening noise, which I was to later understand was called music. Despite the bad batch of Cinnabuns from a Maryland rest stop, my weekend roadtrip wasn’t all a masochist’s wet dream. After exhausting all other methods of entertainment, including two successively heated rounds of the license plate game, I decided that I should probably just give in and listen to my disc-man. Luckily for me the CD I had decided to bring along with me was Okkervil River’s Black Sheep Boy.
With an album cover that looked like a cross between Alice in Wonderland and a Todd Mcfarlane drawing, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I first inserted the crimson red disc and pressed play. The first song, “Black Sheep Boy”, was slowly piped into my earphones, sounding like shortened Elliot Smith outtake. At only 1 minute and 18 seconds long, before your body even adjusts to the melody, you’re launched into the rest of the album much as Alice is launched down the rabbit hole. By the second song, “For Real”, you immediately know you’re someplace as far from the fragile vocals and precious acoustic guitar of “Black Sheep Boy” as one could be. Gone are the Elliot Smithisms, replaced by a tension soaked soft/loud/soft guitar riff and the most frantic over the top vocals this side of Xiu Xiu. The rest of the album fits somewhere between Neutral Milk Hotel’s Aeroplane Over the Sea and a harder rocking My Morning Jacket.
Much like the strange demon adorning much of the CD’s jacket booklet, you feel that singer Will Sheff might be possessed. Throughout the album he exorcises some type of inner demons (most likely romantic) as he bleats, yelps, whispers. All the while you feel he’s frantically looking over his shoulder trying to judge the distance of his pursuing ghosts. Lyrics such as, “December’s lying near, but in the oven’s heat this house is now a home”, have an oddly time displaced quality to them. Not so much the purposeful retro vernacular of the Decemberists, it much more closely resembles the out of time lyrical model Neutral Milk Hotel set with Aeroplane Over the Sea. You can just sense the characters in each song yelling at each other and breaking down in tears on some dusty old porch. Much like the French New wave wasn’t consciously trying to romanticize its landscape, Okkervil River can’t seem to help but paint this extremely inviting southern background, both musically and lyrically, as a setting for its cries of pain. Like the Southern romanticism found on any Iron and Wine song, Okkervil River seems to unconsciously summon these southern fables with ease. All in all it makes for an excellent album unlike any other, except for perhaps the enigmatic Aeroplane Over the Sea. Much like that seminal album, the standout tracks on Black Sheep Boy are the rockers, in this case, “For Real” and “Black”.
After I finished listening to Black Sheep Boy in my friend’s car I was jettisoned back to reality. Its pains, trials and tribulations never as beautifully presented as on Okkervil River’s album. I might have might have made it out of Wonderland of Black Sheep Boy but I knew despite its inner demons I would be visiting again very soon.