Okkervil River writes songs about the downtrodden, the insane, the criminals. And, in doing so, they also write about all of us. These songs are taut with emotion (and REAL emotion, we’re not talking Jimmy Eat World here), heartbreaking at times, overpowering at others. This is a band not afraid to wear their hearts on their sleeves, and for that, I love them. It’s easy to be ironically distant, but it’s very difficult to delve deep into what creates misery, loneliness, and pain and really explore the meanings.
Any discussion of Okkervil River has to focus on Will Sheff, the singer and songwriter. The tortured artist, who turns out extremely dense, literate poems into music. His voice is nothing amazing in a technical sense: it cracks and warbles at times and might be just a bit too boyish. But that is what makes it special, that he reaches and reaches for the right way to express feelings that cannot be explained or understood. The rawness of his voice conveys exactly how disturbing some moments of our lives can be. And when the songs return from these emotional vortexes, the soft, almost delicate, texture of his voice brings us back to the ordinary, the everyday, and forces us to juxtapose these contradictory impulses. Beauty and violence, stillness and terror: Sheff wants us to understand them as interlinked. The worst and the best of humanity is contained within all of us.
Okkervil River proves that you don’t have to be loud, or amp up your electric guitars to make bruising music. These songs drag you kicking and screaming through the storm and then lull you to sleep, softly stroking your cheek as you bury yourself under the covers.
The War Criminal Rises and Speaks
This is the kind of song that people dream about writing. Everything written above applies perfectly for this song. It occurs in three parts: the first focuses on the suburban reality of America: “The heart takes past Subway, past Stop and Shop, past Beal’s, and calls it ‘coming home.’” All is innocuous, and any violence or pain is far off in the distance, it cannot touch us or infect us. The music is quiet, his voice soft, but ever so slowly the tension builds…
The second part places us in the room with the war criminal as he tells his side: “Does the heart wants to atone? Oh, I believe that it’s so, because if I could climb back through time, I’d restore their lives and then give back my own.” All this time the tension is rising, the music begins to pound on the brain and Sheff’s voice crackles with intensity, it bends and breaks and shatters but still keeps on going. He makes no excuses, he cannot even cry, but it is clear that the mistake of 30 years ago has haunted him for every second of his life since. He does not ask to escape punishment, he only asks that those reading and watching to understand that he is not really any different from them, and for the hope that somehow he can be forgiven for falling into the abyss.
The music falls off the table and the quiet, doe-like Sheff is back in the third part. Here, they return to suburbia and deny any linkage between us and the war criminal: “Your heart’s warm and kind. Your mind is your own. Our blood-spattered criminal is inscrutable; don’t worry, he won’t rise up behind your eyes and take wild control. He’s not of this time, he fell out of a hole.” The message is optimistic but something is slightly different in his voice: there is a weariness, or perhaps a wariness: one can almost sense that he wants to believe this but cannot.
We are thus left to wonder whether the war criminal really is an anomaly, a demon or phantom rather than simply a man, or whether he really does reside within all of us. I believe that he does, that the dream of America, or of any person, wholly untouched by these emotions, completely without the capacity for violence, is a myth. The war criminal was not born a monster, nor are we born without the capacity for sin. To fail is not to have been corrupted. No, to fail is to be human. To atone for those failures and make a good life is the highest purpose for which we can aspire. If we are naturally good, there is nothing to lose, but also nothing to gain. That we must struggle, constantly, to hold back the war criminal within ourselves means that life is more than just an endless suburban landscape. And that seems far more optimistic than to simply wish away the pain.
This song is discussed rather extensively in my “top 20 of 2005” list so I won’t go into much detail here. It deals with many of the same themes as “The War Criminal” though on a much more personal level, as the singer attempts to help a loved one who has been abused. It deftly chronicles the helplessness one feels at the impossibility of simply fixing someone who has been emotionally torn apart (“don’t lose me now, let me help you out. Though I know that I can’t help you anyhow”) and the anger which follows closely afterwards. And it’s got a great beat.
This is probably not my third favorite song by them, but I thought it was an accurate reflection of their earlier work and was worth including for that reason. It is much more stripped-down (no strings, horns, or other accompaniment) and a little more folkish. However, it is yet another song about a murderer. This time a young man who kills a girl one night just for the fun of it. The song really hits its stride in the second half as the pace picks up, only to fall away for the devastating final lines: “Now, with all these cameras focused on my face, you’d think they could see it through my skin. They’re looking for evil, thinking they can trace it, but evil don’t look like anything.” That’s the truth of Okkervil River: evil can be seen in our actions and deep in our hearts, but it should never be understood as something simple. In these “Axis of Evil” days, I think that’s something worth remembering.
One shouldn’t get the impression from this that they only write songs about murderers, abusers, and the violent. These themes are very important, but just as important is the reality that the possibility for inflicting pain is within us all, but at the same time, the possibility of understanding pain is there as well. Which means that we all contain the capacity for empathy. And this is what Okkervil River is really about: our responsibility for empathy and happiness in the face of our capacity for violence.