vinylfanatics.com

**Okkervil River - The Stand Ins**
★★★★☆

Will Sheff has always been indie rock's great overthinker, a songwriter who treats every melody like a philosophical crisis and every chord change like a literary device. By 2008, his Austin-based outfit Okkervil River had already proven themselves masters of narrative-driven rock with two career-defining albums that established them as essential listening for anyone who believed guitars could carry the weight of great literature.

Their 2005 breakthrough "Black Sheep Boy" transformed them from scrappy indie darlings into critical favorites, weaving a complex tapestry around Tim Hardin's tragic folk ballad of the same name. Sheff's obsession with doomed musicians and the mythology of American music reached its zenith here, creating a concept album that felt both deeply personal and universally resonant. The follow-up, 2007's "The Stage Names," saw the band grappling with fame, performance, and the uncomfortable relationship between artist and audience. It was their most cohesive statement yet, a meditation on authenticity in an age of manufactured emotion.

Which brings us to "The Stand Ins," originally conceived as the second half of "The Stage Names" sessions but eventually released as its own beast entirely. If "The Stage Names" was Okkervil River's anxious examination of showbusiness, "The Stand Ins" is their hangover—a collection of songs that feel like morning-after confessions, raw and unfiltered in ways that both illuminate and occasionally frustrate.

The album opens with "Lost Coastlines," a swirling, seven-minute epic that finds Sheff at his most vulnerable, singing about creative exhaustion and the weight of expectations over a bed of strings that seem to breathe with their own melancholy. It's quintessential Okkervil River: literate without being pretentious, emotional without being maudlin. The song builds to a cathartic climax that feels like purging years of artistic anxiety in real time.

"Singer Songwriter" serves as the album's most direct statement, a meta-commentary on the very act of being Will Sheff that manages to be both self-deprecating and genuinely moving. Over a deceptively simple acoustic framework, Sheff dissects the mythology of the tortured artist with surgical precision, questioning whether his pain is authentic or performed. It's the kind of song that could easily collapse under the weight of its own cleverness, but Sheff's commitment to emotional honesty keeps it grounded.

The real revelation here is "Blue Tulip," a gorgeous piece of chamber-pop that showcases the band's expanded sonic palette. Justin Sherburn's guitar work has never sounded more elegant, while the rhythm section of Patrick Pestorius and Scott Brackett provides a foundation that's both sturdy and surprisingly elastic. It's a reminder that beneath all the literary pretensions, Okkervil River remains a formidable rock band.

Musically, "The Stand Ins" finds the group expanding their indie rock template with increased orchestration and a willingness to let songs breathe and develop organically. There's a looseness here that wasn't always present on their more tightly constructed earlier albums, a sense that these songs were discovered rather than architected. Sometimes this approach yields transcendent moments; other times it results in tracks that feel undercooked or overly indulgent.

The album's back half occasionally sags under the weight of Sheff's introspection, with songs like "Starry Stairs" and "Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979" feeling more like interesting experiments than fully realized compositions. But even Okkervil River's lesser moments contain enough literary and musical intelligence to reward careful listening.

In the fifteen years since its release, "The Stand Ins" has aged into something of a cult favorite among Okkervil River's catalog. While it may lack the immediate impact of "Black Sheep Boy" or the cohesive vision of "The Stage Names," it captures the band at a crucial transitional moment, grappling with success and artistic identity in ways that feel both specific to their experience and broadly relatable.

The album stands as a fascinating document of a band refusing to repeat themselves, even when repetition might have been the safer choice. It's messy, ambitious, and occasionally frustrating—much like the creative process it so eloquently examines. For a band that's always been more interested in asking difficult questions than providing easy answers, "The Stand Ins" feels