I Am Very Far is ostensibly Okkervil River's first non-concept album in eight years. After Down the River of Golden Dreams in 2003, the Austin-based group released two sets of linked records: Black Sheep Boy and Black Sheep Boy Appendix both re-imagined Tim Hardin's title song as a phantasmagorical rock'n'roll cautionary tale, full of goat-headed men and hearts literally made of stone. The Stage Names and The Stand Ins played like two installments of a dark tour diary, deconstructing old rock myths and scrawling out new ones. Together, these four albums revealed frontman Will Sheff as one of indie rock's most ambitious thinkers: a romantic anti-romantic weighing highly literate lyrics against an endlessly bleak worldview.
For all its bluster, however, 2008's The Stand Ins suggested Sheff's large-scale ideas were yielding diminishing returns. It was an impressive run that explored the edges of indie-rock songwriting and distinguished Okkervil River from so many of their peers, but it's refreshing that I Am Very Far is a collection of songs-as-statements rather than a collection-of-songs as statement. These 11 tracks sound more like stand-alone efforts rather than pieces of a larger puzzle, even if they do revisit and expound on many of Sheff's pet themes. The thundering war stomp of "The Valley"-- which opens the album like a pre-ritual incantation-- soundtracks a journey through "the valley of the rock'n'roll dead," which may be Sheff's idea of a summer festival. On "Hanging From a Hit", he's saved from the abyss by an earworm, then listens as his married lover describes her marriage: "I'm too much mine without him," she says of her husband. "I limp from life."
These songs may be less grounded in familiar settings and predicaments than previous efforts, and therefore a bit more oblique, but lines like those quoted above can be hooks in themselves-- as catchy and sharp as choruses, sticking in your mind as you decode their ambiguities. As a result, Sheff's songs never truly sound settled but remain lively and prickly, especially as various images repeat throughout the album, motifs instead of concepts that suture these songs together. There's a throat in every track, either cut and open or bound to be cut: "A slit throat makes a note like a raw winter wind," he sings on "The Valley", adding to its visceral energy. Of course Jagjaguwar is releasing a small chapbook of lyrics as a promo item and part of the deluxe vinyl edition.
More remarkably, however, I Am Very Far manages to put Sheff's lyrics and the band's music on equal footing, creating a monolithic sound whose density resembles the thick block of prose-poem text in the chapbook. Perhaps emboldened by his work on Roky Erickson's last album, Sheff produced this record himself, recording in short, intense sessions around the country rather than taking advantage of an extended studio stay. That tactic worked well for their previous albums, but I Am Very Far benefits form the piecemeal approach, which allows Sheff to give each song a distinctive personality and creates a strong dynamic in the sequencing. "We Need a Myth" shifts from subtle exotica to towering orchestral rock, while "Hanging From a Hit" dissembles it with a quiet dancehall piano, a trumpet solo recorded form out on the boardwalk, and low, lovely gospel harmonies, which are perhaps warmer and more sympathetic for being wordless.
Sheff favors a towering wall of sound on almost every song, in most cases doubling the instruments in the line-up (two drummers, two piano players, etc.) and layering full takes on top of each other. With a density that can be a bit impenetrable and with a heaviness that Okkervil River have only gestured to in the past, I Am Very Far lags in the middle with the staircase-to-nowhere crescendo of "White Shadow Waltz" and the rambling "We Need a Myth". Sheff recovers with the gut-punch combination of the tense "Show Yourself" and "Your Past Life as a Blast", a surprisingly affecting paean to a wandering brother (perhaps a sequel to "A Favor", from 2004's Sleep and Wake-Up Songs EP). I Am Very Far closes with "The Rise", which is constructed around a call-and-response Sheff performs with himself-- a literal doubling borne out of the lyrical themes. The oboe-and-strings orchestration recalls the lush easy listening of the Carpenters, but Okkervil River put it in service to lyrics about forest fires, wounded stags, and the utter loneliness of death. Even so, it comes as a relief that the song doesn't end with a big, fiery finale. Instead, the band lets "The Rise" fray apart on its own, a quiet conclusion to a lyrically and musically feisty album.
