Away is the first Okkervil River album without Okkervil River on it. Will Sheff’s backing band has been a revolving door for a while now, yet even as new faces came and went, they’d always conducted themselves as a real band, especially on the road, where their live shows remained as feverish as ever. But after a tumultuous few years marked by loss and even more lineup changes than usual, Sheff was left questioning whether he even wanted to continue the group. The frontman approached Away like a solo project, writing it on his own and cherry-picking session players to help him record. And as part of that new approach, Sheff turned his back on the frothy rock‘n’roll that had previously driven the band’s finest moments.
To start, on Away, Sheff has said that he tried to avoid working with rock musicians. “I’m not as interested in rock‘n’roll as I used to be,” he said. “I don’t really think of this as rock.” And so for Away he went full Astral Weeks, stacking the deck with jazz, folk, and classical musicians, including members of the orchestral ensemble yMusic and Marissa Nadler, who lends harmony vocals throughout. Drummer Cully Symington is the only carryover from the last incarnation of Okkervil River, and from his featherlight, Connie Kay-esque brush work here, you’d never guess he’s the same guy who’s been drumming for Cursive for the last few years.
Sheff ratifies his fresh start by symbolically killing off the band on the album opener “Okkervil River R.I.P.” “They had some great songs/Must have been a great time so long ago,” he sings on the nearly seven-minute elegy to his past, his creaky voice rising to an early-Dylan sneer as the song is hugged by some familiar Wurlitzer organ. Those woozy organs have been an Okkervil River signature since the very first song of their first record, but here they serve as a callback to something lost, a little more kindling for the funeral pyre.
A nearly seven-minute opener could be an album’s flagship statement, but Away is packed with so many songs that approach or pass the seven-minute mark that none carries more weight than any other. A modestly fit listener could run a mile in the time it takes to get through the gentlest number, “Call Yourself Renee,” a soft parade of strings and woodwinds with the hushed quality of Nick Drake. The twinkling “Judey on a Street” is even longer and in less of hurry. Sheff frames it as a lesson about the virtues of patience: “I’m gonna wait for my girl to come,” he sings, “She always takes a little time.” And so do these songs.
Away’s unflashy, lyrics-first approach marks a correction from Okkervil River’s production-centric last couple of records, 2011’s prickly I Am Very Far and 2013’s openhearted The Silver Gymnasium. The latter album was pitched on a clever gimmick: Sheff took on the big pop aesthetics of his childhood, tapping the same vein of ’80s nostalgia that made Netflix’s “Stranger Things” such a sleeper hit this summer. It was a play for a wider audience, and a spirited one, but the public didn’t bite. Now, a songwriter who once passed himself off as so indifferent to the spotlight that he made an entire record about it—and then a sequel—fears being shut out. (“I’ve been up and down in my career, and I’ve spent time worrying about it,” Sheff admitted to NPR.) Those anxieties come across on “The Industry,” the closest Away comes to a rock song. “I thought that it was us against the world,” Sheff croons, “but now it’s me against something so big and abstract that I can’t tell what it is.”
Sheff isn’t really interested in sour grapes, though. Instead of griping about an industry that’s no longer working for him, he made a change and tested out a new direction. Away doesn’t aim for the rafters the way Okkervil River did on their best albums, when Sheff was unabashedly playing to the crowd. But there’s a sense that he’s making the record for himself, and an attendant thrill that comes from eavesdropping on that. Away’s scope may be personal, but its takeaways are universal. It’s a touching album about moving on, about the satisfaction of leaving the past behind before it leaves you.
