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DOWN THE RIVER OF GOLDEN DREAMS
(Jagjaguwar)
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There’s water everywhere on the second full-length from Texas-via-New-Hampshire quartet Okkervil River. It "pours from the faucet’s mouth, like our fortune comes flowing out" in the lush, somnambulant dirge "For the Enemy." In "Dead Faces," which starts buoyant and ends exultant, a guy and a gal "go laughing and running down to the water, there by the sea, where the body just floats like a rowboat and the moon’s like a harbor light lit in the sky." The layered organs of "Song About a Star" seem to catch the wind as strings dive and weave, "lifted by lights . . . over acres of loving coast . . . floating anchorless." Frontman Will Sheff’s songs are full of protean wordplay, with stirring images embedded like seaglass in cascading confessionals that read like rambling, stream-of-consciousness tracts but are sung in an earnest, plaintive manner. The playing is fluid and often forceful, ebbing and flowing between delicately whispered remembrances ("Maine Island Lovers") and — augmented with string and brass sections — surging, grandiose orchestration ("The War Criminal Rises and Speaks," "It Ends with a Fall") that glints like sunlight off a coruscating, white-capped sea. (Okkervil River perform this Monday, May 17, upstairs at the Middle East, 472 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square; call 617-864-EAST.)
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