Okkervil River – The
Silver Gymnasium
ATO, 2013
Okkervil River are one of those bands I still think of as a
young band despite not being all that young anymore. Will Sheff is almost
forty. That fact is insane to me, because I have this impression of him frozen
in carbonite. It’s a mental snapshot I took the first time I saw Okkervil
River. I’d downloaded their debut Don’t
Fall in Love With Everyone You See off of the long defunct file-sharing
site AudioGalaxy (for whom, I recently read, Sheff contributed music writing,
in a weird twist of fate). I thought “Red” was one of the most sad and
beautiful songs I had ever heard, and I was hearing it at a time when I was
really truly branching out from punk rock. I think I’d heard Neutral Milk Hotel
for the first time a month or two before. It was a fragile time, a place where
unbeknownst to me the tastes I would carry for the rest of my life were
cementing. And written in the concrete of the basketball of my favorite bands
Will Sheff, on stage at the Bottleneck in Lawrence in early 2004 standing atop
the bass drum as he furiously pounds out the acoustic chords of “Westfall” or “It Ends in a Fall” or
“Kansas City” and almost breaking his ankle on the dismount. I’d gone to very
few shows at that point in my life, and Will Sheff was the first singer I ever
saw who projected this surreal honesty with this look on his face that could
only be read as, “This is the most important thing in the world to me.” I
barely even went to that show and it’s one of the most important shows I ever
went to.
I had a few more weird encounters with Sheff over the next
decade. Once outside the men’s room at the Mohawk during SXSW where I was going
in and recognized him, froze up, and kind of steeled myself to tell him how
much his songs meant to me and he seemed genuinely appreciative of my worship.
A few years later, in the wake of I Am
Very Far I got the chance to interview Sheff for the Pitch. I spent a week
pumping myself up and hammering out questions. I hate interviews, because I am
perpetually nervous about people I admire. Scheduling conflicts arose and I
ended up having to settle for an e-mail interview which is barely an interview
at all but it remarkably turned out not bad considering I received the answers
to my questions and had to write the intro and edit the piece in the Dunn
Brothers parking lot in 15 minutes while hijacking their free internet. There’s
another important aspect of Okkervil River that makes them so important to me:
They’ve never made a bad album.
Okkervil River has been putting out records for more than a
decade and each one has been excellent. The early ones are a little more ragged
but in a charming way. A way that dictates potential and now those records only
pale when compared to such towering achievements as Black Sheep Boy and The Stage
Names. Every one of their albums is tied to a specific time and place. Black Sheep Boy is married to a
particularly nasty break-up, the
Stand-Ins attached to the first weeks my wife and I dated. The Silver Gymnasium finds me at a time
where I am writing a novel about the pitfalls of high school romance, and it
feels rather fitting. The Silver
Gymnasium is an allegedly autobiographical account of Sheff’s upbringing in
tiny Meriden, New Hampshire and plays out like a series of half-remembered
memories, myths, and brutal truths with production and instrumentation recalls
the mid-1980s in which these songs are set.
Glossy synthesizers and errant sax solos dot the landscape
as Sheff digs into the heavy shit of youth. For the first time in their career,
Okkervil River has made a true grower. This was problematic at first and led to
much hand wringing at the concept that Okkervil River made an album I didn’t
like. But then the songs caught up, the themes sank in, and the emotional depth
that Sheff bakes into his songs started to seep through. Upon a dozen listens,
I realized my initial trepidation was caused by “Stay Young” and “Walking
Without Franking.” The songs appear back to back at the back half of the album
and I wanted to skip them every time I listened to the album. “Stay Young” just
doesn’t feel up to the standard of quality of the rest of the album and comes
off as almost lazy. The synthesizers bray and the song feels like a misguided
dance track. The melody is flat and the words feel crudely wrapped around the music.
“Walking Without Frankie” is a little better but still feels like a non-starter
despite a compelling lyrics sheet.
Still, my qualms are minor and both “Stay Young” and
“Walking Without Frankie” could very well grow on me as I continue to absorb
the album over the course of the year. The rest of the songs are the sort of
songs you have come to expect from Okkervil River: beautifully written and
composed tunes that pull at your heart, cause you to pore over the lyrics, and
make your life feel a little fuller. “Down Down the Deep River” not only feels
like the key that cracks this whole album open and is the most tightly composed
track the band has ever put together. A nostalgic synthesizer plays out the
melody at first, but as the song rolls along it’s ultimately reduced to a
supporting role by horns and a pretty little harpsichord. The song feels full
and heavy and as I was feeling my way through this album in the dark, that’s
the one that turned the light on.
The Silver Gymnasium
feels a bit like a tragedy, which I suppose is how one’s youth occasionally
looks in hindsight. Opener “It Was Our Season” is a terrifically sad account of
young, doomed love and “Where the Spirit Left Us” and the aforementioned “Down
Down the Deep River” just sort of ache. Come
to think of it, all of the songs sort of ache. Fortunately, all of that ache is counterbalanced by the swagger in
Pink-Slips,” the jaunty, horn-driven “On a Balcony,” and the martial trajectory
of “White.” Sheff is a songwriter who has always poured his heart out onto the
page, but The Silver Gymnasium feels
so personal it comes across as cryptic, which makes it all the more alluring. I
have no clue what “Lido Pier Suicide Car” is about, but the way it builds from
the quietest moments on the record to some of the most transcendent gives me
shivers.
Will Sheff has clearly pushed his songwriting to a new level
and the band manages roll with the punches and incorporate new elements like
they’ve been there all along. The Silver
Gymnasium is a complicated record, easily the most difficult Okkervil River
has crafted to date. It’s a period piece that pays a consistent homage to the
music of the 80s and while not all of it works, most of it does and at the end
of it all you still get the impression that there are bands out there who,
despite having carved out a sound that people love, never get comfortable and
keep pushing past their limits.
"It Was Our Season"
"Lido Pier Suicide Car," performed in the Silver Gymnasium of the album's namesake, because of course.
