Routine can be both a blessing and a hindrance. It can provide structure to a chaotic life, or it can cause it to grow stale. It can act as a compass, or the rocks which crash the ship. In the middle of a long tour, on a Monday night, you might find yourself inspired to play new tunes and reinvent old ones, or weary of playing songs you played for years. Okkervil River frontman Will Sheff alluded to this phenomenon last week as the band played to a weekday crowd at Omaha’s Slowdown. When asked by a member of the crowd to repeat the third song of their set, “Black”, from their third album Black Sheep Boy, Sheff called back, “Its enough to play that song just once a night. Its a song about murder.”
It may be the nuances of each night within the routine that get us through. As the night drew to a close, before the final song, Sheff ditched his guitar to bop around the stage to each band member and then to the crowd. While imploring us to clap along, he chided a woman standing near the rear of the club wearing a red dress, chanting “You’re not too cool to put your hands up!” Even in the midst of our weekday routines, none of us were.
Okkervil River’s brand of music has always been built around Sheff’s ability to craft intricate stories both autobiographical and fictional into rock songs. This especially on the heels of their seventh studio album The Silver Gymnasium, an introspective album set in Sheff’s childhood home of Meriden, NH. The record is constructed around tales from Sheff’s childhood as he tries to make sense of the memories he recalls. An ’80s theme permeates Gynasium, with references to Ataris and VCRs, a theme that the band brought with them to Omaha. As instruments were tuned and sounds checked, one might’ve noticed trinkets gracing the stage, including a Transformer, Juicy Fruit tin, and assorted action figures. These dramatic flourishes, when added to the evolving holographic backdrop of the town in which The Silver Gynasium takes place, immersed the venue in Sheff’s memory from the beginning.
The band spread the wealth among their most popular albums, leaning only slightly heavily on newer material. The set began the same as their new album, with the cheery piano riff of “It Was My Season,” and continued right into the soaring “On A Balcony,” the first display of guitarist Lauren Gurgiolo’s chops. Notes exploded from her hands throughout the night as she tapped danced across her effects pedal apparatus. The group was polished and on point from the beginning and played without pause until about the midway point, as Sheff bantered with himself and the louder members of the crowd. The meat of the set included the pounding “The Valley,” and a truncated “Black Nemo” intro to the epic “Down Down the Deep River.”
A crowd that already seemed thrilled to be there helped Sheff find his glasses in the dark, brought him a whiskey, and was even caught singing along at the beginning of the encore as he played a solo rendition of “A Stone”. He stopped, smiled, and playfully retorted before continuing. The rest of the band returned to round out the set with the somber “A Girl In Port”, followed by a rousing edition of “Unless Its Kicks,” during which Sheff wielded his mic stand aloft and nearly decapitated a member of the audience. As they slammed the set shut the same way they had for weeks, I thought to myself, I suppose you’re not too cool to do that either.
The Replacement-Level Lebowski 