Album Review

Usually, when you’re talking about a sequel, you’re referring to a big-budget Hollywood craptacular that destroys whatever charms the original movie might have had. Rest assured though that Will Sheff, the prodigiously gifted songwriter and frontman of the Austin-based indie darlings Okkervil River, has loftier ambitions for The Stand-Ins, the band’s follow-up to last year’s critically acclaimed release, The Stage Names. He’s calling it a sequel, but it’s more like Side B to The Stage Names’ side A.

Like its predecessor, The Stand-Ins is, on its surface, all about the trappings, and traps, of fame. In lesser hands, material like this could come off as self-indulgent whining about uncomfortable tour buses and the like. But Sheff has something profound to say, not only about fame but about the relationship between fan and artist, about the transitory nature of art, and about the difficulties we all have reconciling the romantic expectations of youth with the harsher realities of life.

Luckily, Sheff’s long songs, which usually lack a chorus, don’t come off as dissertations, mainly because of his band’s effortless assimilation of everything from New Wave (“Pop Lie”) to horn-filled faux-Motown (“Starry Stairs”) to tender, piano balladry (“On Tour With Zykos”). You don’t need to know the story behind album opener “Lost Coastlines” to get swept up in the forward momentum of the “Lust For Life”-style drumbeat or feel the melancholy of the horns. And the best thing about “Blue Tulip,” one of the few songs in which Sheff’s lyrics seem labored, is the stirring instrumental coda.

Meanwhile, the bandleader definitely feels ambivalent about the rock-star lifestyle. “Lost Coastlines,” featuring vocals by former Okkervil River member Jonathan Meiburg, uses a ship at sea as a metaphor for a band on tour that sometimes feels adrift in hostile waters (“We don’t recognize the names upon these signs.”) “Pop Lie” is more caustic: “He’s the liar who lied in his pop song/And you’re lying when you sing along.” And “Singer Songwriter” suggests that the music is, in the end, ineffectual (“Our world is gonna change nothing.”).

But the thing that separates Sheff from many other surveyors of the pop-culture scene is his empathy, especially for those on the fringe left behind, like groupies (“Starry Stairs”) or spurned lovers (“On Tour With Zykos”). Especially fine is “Calling And Not Calling My Ex,” in which the band swings on an organ-filled groove that’s reminiscent of mid-60’s Dylan. Sheff plays the odd man out here, genuinely happy for the success of his actress ex-girlfriend while still wishing he had done more to make her stay. He ends with the double-edged line “Go break their hearts,” which all at once wishes good luck and betrays his own woe.

As on The Stage Names, Sheff uses The Stand-Ins last song (“Bruce Wayne Campbell, Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979”) to crawl inside the head of a doomed artist. Knowing that Campbell was a gay glam-rocker who flopped in the mid 70’s and eventually died of complications from AIDS may help to appreciate the song at face value. But eventually, Sheff’s tale, which plays like a more tragic version of “My Way,” reveals more about Campbell than a Wikipedia recap ever could. And when Sheff sympathetically grants Campbell a graceful departure (“Stars hold him in all around/ ‘Til he forgets the ground/ ‘Til he forgets the crawling way/Real people sometimes are”), it’s a heart-tugging moment that, contrary to Sheff’s earlier protests, does indeed have lasting value.

Chances are Sheff and the ever-changing line-up of Okkervil River will find different subject matter next time around. But we’re only one album away from a trilogy here, and, based on these superlative results, that final album would be highly anticipated indeed.

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