Post- Music: Okkervil River

The Stand Ins, Austin-based indie-band Okkervil River’s fifth full-length album and follow-up to 2007’s The Stage Names, is a testament to frontman Willl Sheff’s multitasking abilities. Collaborating with former Okkervil River bandmate Jonathan Meiburg on side project Shearwater since 2001 and performing solo has obviously not dissipated the band's power as they've come up with another winner.
The album unfolds itself as an artistic endeavor that does not adhere to any one genre. The opening anthem “Lost Coastlines” is an ideal blend of folk and melodic indie pop; “Singer Songwriter” intersperses similar layers of twang with some pop punk guitar upstrokes. The Stand Ins’ most musically mature moment comes with “Starry Stairs,” a four-minute slinkier, slower and jazzier track that melds Okkervil River’s familiar guitar riffs with strings and horns to great effect.
Arguably Okkervil River’s greatest asset is Sheff’s songwriting abilities; as a lyricist, he taps into universal emotions – love, loneliness, fame and despair, to name a few – with clever wordplay to spare. As a musician, he architects listener-friendly melodies whose innovation merely acts in concert with their accessibility.
As a vocalist, the rich, charismatic quality of Sheff’s voice is both a strength and a weakness, somewhat endearing and yet almost too lovestruck-emo-boy to take seriously. Similarly, the Stand Ins loses its initial steam about halfway through; “Blue Tulip” is an epic poem of a song and “Pop Lie” fails to build upon the album’s previous creativity and instead adheres to a basic formula.
But the Stand Ins regains its strength and ends on a high-note; the album’s closing track “Bruce Wayne Campbell Interview On the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979” slowly but surely leads to a musical climax that demonstrates Sheff’s ability to write songs that have a distinct beginning, middle and end, songs that lead to somewhere entirely different from where they started.
All in all, the Stand Ins fails to venture deep into any uncharted musical territory, but its journey into the depths of eclectic pop-rock is nothing short of a pleasant forty minute voyage.

(and check out Sheff's knee slappingly witty cover of Big Star's "Big Black Car" from the Black Cab Sessions.)