Life was a crummy movie on Okkervil River's breakthrough album, The Stage Names. On The Stand Ins, it's a lousy rock show. As the interchangeable titles and puzzle-piece album covers imply, this new record is an extension of its predecessor, a further untangling of themes and ideas about music, art, celebrity, love, and the folly of it all. The Stand Ins doesn't quite match the gusto and brainy emotionalism of The Stage Names but it exceeds its bleakness. Pop songs lie, tortured singer-songwriters are wealthy narcissists, groupies have regrets, music scenes wither, nothing changes. Rock promises redemption but delivers only destruction, or at best, cultish relative obscurity. Okkervil River are the anti-Hold Steady. They should tour together.
At first listen, the main difference between The Stand Ins and The Stage Names is that Okkervil's latest lacks the sense of surprise. The band's 2005 record Black Sheep Boy came out of nowhere, a thematic and musical step forward after two strong earlier albums, and The Stage Names revealed a tight, resourceful band who played with enough force to redeem leader Will Sheff's doomed characters. The Stand Ins continues that ambitious musical development, further roughing up the group's sound while sharpening its attack to an even finer point, and refining some of their old tricks while introducing new ones (see: the country shuffle of "Singer Songwriter", Sheff's smooth croon on "Lost Coastlines", and the short orchestral interludes tying everything together like incidental film music.)
The Stand Ins begins with an orchestral prelude, before filling in the pages of Sheff's tattered songbook with "Lost Coastlines", whose boat metaphor and buoyant bassline hint at a connection with Stage Names closer "John Allyn Smith Sails". The song changes shape often, toggling between an acoustic jangle and a tense electric groove until it finally drifts out to sea on a sing-along of la la la's. Those syllables carry as much weight here as any other lyrics. It's a thrilling introduction, maybe even more apt than "Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe".
Touring almost constantly since well before Black Sheep Boy, Okkervil River have transformed into an urgent rock band that imbues Sheff's songs with as much energy and personality as he does. At times, The Stand Ins sounds like a bassist's album: Patrick Pestorius plays like he's quit the rhythm section, adding unexpectedly melodic riffs that lend subtle gradations of color to these compositions. It's his bopping theme that connects the dots on "Lost Coastlines" and "Calling and Not Calling My Ex". When "Singer Songwriter" threatens to topple under its top-heavy accusations, Brian Cassidy and the Wrens' Charles Bissell right the song with their determined roadhouse gallop and piercing guitar licks. Then the band does a 180 and follows it up with the soulful, horn-laden midtempo groove of "Starry Stairs" (which may or may not be a sequel to "Savannah Smiles") and the grandiose show-closer "Blue Tulip", which ends with a perfect Byrdsy guitar riff-- one of the album's best moments.
In short, the band complements and counterbalances Sheff's cerebral songwriting simply by rocking out. His braininess is perhaps his greatest asset, and he's become one of the best lyric-writers going in indie rock, with a dense and distinctive style that trades on wordplay and internal rhymes. Song for song, he can jerk a tear with a carefully observed detail or turn of phrase ("Blue Tulip" in particular is a backlash tragedy on a human scale), but it's the way those songs talk to one another that makes Okkeril River albums so durable and fascinating.
Sheff wants to look beyond common pop song notions to discover something truer and more essential, no matter how disillusioning it may be, which is the central, enthralling contradiction for Okkervil River: Even as they ruthlessly deconstruct pop music, they make great pop music. The darker Sheff gets, the more honest he sounds and the more absorbing the song. By that equation, the stand-out on The Stand Ins is "Pop Lie", an exquisitely bleak dismantling of singer-songwriter pretensions. The pop singer lies in his songs, "and you're lying when you sing along!" (Hey, Hold Steady...) It's not hard to imagine a venue full of excited fans singing along, although it's difficult to determine whether he would view their participation as a bitter irony or a sincerely funny cosmic joke. Or if he would just smile and enjoy the moment, knowing that any listener can take that pop lie and make it true.
