Okkervil River - In The Rainbow Rain (ATO Records)

Okkervil River – In The Rainbow Rain (ATO Records)

Last night I dreamt of a river full of fish and as I swam amongst them I was surrounded by obtuse shards of colour almost lost in the darkness of the water. It seemed important at the time that they were obtuse. Everything else was black and charcoal in the brackish pool and then there was a song, a massive soft rock song with choirs and a saxophone solo, part ‘Walk of Life‘ part ‘Dancing In The Street‘, not the sort of thing I would normally want infiltrating my dreams but it was wonderful and the song was ‘The Dream and the Light’ (in juxtaposing the sombre verse and celebratory chorus singer/songwriter Will Sheff delivers the first high water mark of In The Rainbow Rain and it won’t be the only one). Anyway, it occurred to me that the song was oddly reminiscent of Springsteen doing Dire Straits (or was it The War On Drugs doing Springsteen doing Dire Straits) as the water began to vibrate musically. Fisherman lore has it that when the rain falls, it confuses the fish, who all rise to the surface making them easier to hook, and as the rain fell from above, or was it below, the fish scattered in a beautiful rainbow out of the water into the rain… And from this I imagined In The Rainbow Rain was born as, after two decades and eight albums, Sheff steers the river Okkervil out of a moody Americana prone to occasional bouts of optimism into an unlikely contender for Arcade Fire’s celebratory indie crown.

Opener ‘Famous Tracheotomies’ is a jaunty ode to the time the singer nearly died as a toddler, Sheff reeling off a rhyming list of people who’ve had tracheotomies in a twee-indie Sunday school recital sort of way. ‘Love Somebody’ gets the full Win Butler treatment albeit with the Okkervil lyrical bent as our protagonist’s terminal teenage anxiety comes to a head as he ultimately learns to live and love. The varied instrumentation throughout is impressive (I’ll piously reference Tango In The Night here) but the almost sickly, overbearing 80s feel often detracts from the band’s trademark sentimental/nostalgic lyrical content which means, contrarily, other themes of suicide are a little lost as the cheerfulness tries too hard to pin down the perfect eighties pop song without that decade’s penchant for the huge show choruses; alas there is always a saxophonist at hand so that’s alright then.

While 2016’s Away opened with the presumptuous ‘Okkervil River RIP’ it wasn’t a huge departure stylistically – rather a deathbed confessional that the current format of the band was getting a bit tired – however there is nothing on In The Rainbow Rain that comes close to its wistful folk-pop precision. Maybe more in vogue with 2013’s The Silver Gymnasium’s upbeat moments, as if on the cusp of some great alt-alchemy (to list some North American bands of a certain time: Flaming Lips, Grant Lee Buffalo, Bran Van 3000, the B-52s, Moby Grape, the band America) unfortunately In The Rainbow Rain is often underwhelming as it gently flows from one genre bending eyot to the next without leaving the safety of a familiar meander. Channelling Robert Smith on ‘Don’t Move Back To LA’ the goth/Golden State hydra fails and where there has always been a touch of Field Music mischief or Mountain Goats wilfulness about Okkervil here, for the first time, there is an occasional lack of originality. Like the fish scattering, the band are often pulled in all sorts of musical directions which, while not directionless, the lack of a coherent theme musically makes In The Rainbow Rain sometimes feel like a random explosion of colours without the natural order of the meteorological phenomenon it draws from.

If the pan pipes of ‘Shelter Song’ don’t finally push you towards the eject button Sheff’s loungey ode to home will probably mean you think this is the band’s finest record to date. By introducing the guitar solo with “take a walk” he ups the cheese ante fully to The Burning Hell hot. The ambient folk of ‘External Actor’ is genuinely original though, as the almost spoken word monologue tumbles seemingly unrehearsed from the singer’s mouth. If only the rest of this record could have been so bold and challenging, and again the instrumental experimenting adds a deeper accoutrement. More is, in fact, more. Annoyingly there is a very good EP in the thick of In The Rainbow Rain but even at only ten songs it’s at times unrealised, only taken in a completely linear way does it follow a pleasing upward curve, so if the band’s next album is anything like the end of this one we can expect great things once again.

…Finally, as the fish broke free into the rainbow rain, I thought when the first fish crawled onto land they didn’t burst free from the oceans into a kaleidoscopic sunlight; it was the end of a gradual process of thousands of genetic mutations over millions of years and as Okkervil River embark on the next stage of their musical evolution I think we can allow them the odd less successful variant.

In The Rainbow Rain is released on ATO Records.

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