Will Sheff sounds mad. Not angry mad, but the other mad-- nearly hysterical. On Okkervil River's fourth album, Black Sheep Boy, he oversings beyond the limits of taste and vocal cords, either belting the notes forcefully or overenunciating his syllables at quieter moments. You can even hear his agitated spittle hitting the microphone on "For Real". It's as if his voice is too small a vessel for the big ideas and even bigger emotions that drive the band. As Pauline Kael once wrote of Gene Wilder, Sheff "taps a private madness," as if the pain and heartbreak around him-- the runaway sons, abused daughters, lost friends, damaged lovers, and doomed relationships that comprise the world of the album-- push him to caterwauling arias, his hysteria barely bottled by the demands of his carefully constructed songs. But, like Wilder, Sheff never overplays his hand and always maintains control, which, also like Wilder, makes him at once heartbreaking and somewhat humorous-- more self-aware than Conor Oberst, more serious than Colin Meloy, more legible than Jeff Mangum.
Black Sheep Boy creates a roomy and natural showcase for Sheff's high-wire vocals, and as a result, it may be the band's best album, the crest of a wave that began with 2003's Down the River of Golden Dreams and rose through a subsequent EP and two releases by sister band Shearwater. Okkervil River's major accomplishment-- what sets Black Sheep Boy farthest apart from previous efforts-- is the sense of purpose to these songs: they sound studiously literate, melodic, and concise, which bolsters their cumulative effect. A concept album that moves thematically rather than narratively, Black Sheep Boy was inspired by the Tim Hardin song of the same name and begins with a more or less faithful cover. The following 10 songs expound on these themes of prodigality and wanderlust as the band display an unflinching devotion to the sheepish title metaphor, following it all the way through until the boy becomes a ram.
Writing in first-person, Sheff traffics not in plots, but in predicaments full of concrete details and clever wordplay. On "Black", a man despairs to counsel and comfort his lover, who was abducted and possibly abused as a child. "April 12th, with nobody else around; you were outside the house...when he put you in the car," Sheff sings, capturing the character's boiling frustration and romantic abandon. Meanwhile, the band churns a bouncy pop energy, driven by Jonathan Meiburg's keyboards and Zachary Thomas's rubber-ball bass, which pushes and prods him along, intensifying the emotions even as it seems at tonal odds with the dark material. But, as the music makes clear, "Black" is a love song, a statement of determined devotion.
The sound on Black Sheep Boy, while certainly familiar to fans, is so far removed from the purposefully lulling pace of Golden Dreams that it could belong to another band altogether. To an extent, it does: The quartet has grown into a sextet, and the expanded line-up is evident in the ambitious, intricate, yet accessible arrangements and the dramatic dynamic between the songs. "For Real", "Black", and "The Latest Toughs" are frenzied headlong rushes that nicely offset the quieter moments like "A King and a Queen" and "In a Radio Song". "A Stone" rests on a bare honky-tonk two-step shuffle, and Howard Draper's lap steel adds a flourish to "Get Big", a duet with Amy Annelle. Careening strings and crescendoing horns add catharsis to the eight-minute "So Come Back, I Am Waiting", the album's climax. "A Glow", though, is its dark denouement, a menacing coda to Okkervil River's most sustained and startling collection of songs yet, throughout which the band makes Sheff's private madness starkly public.
