The Stage Names Free MP3, Song Download, Lyrics, Album Track List

The Stage Names

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Song	Lyrics	Save	Buy
PLAY QUEUE 1 Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe		save
PLAY QUEUE 2 Unless It's Kicks		save
PLAY QUEUE 3 A Hand To Take Hold Of The Scene		save
PLAY QUEUE 4 Savannah Smiles		save
PLAY QUEUE 5 Plus Ones		save
PLAY QUEUE 6 A Girl In Port		save
PLAY QUEUE 7 You Can't Hold The Hand Of A Rock & Roll Man		save
PLAY QUEUE 8 Title Track		save
PLAY QUEUE 9 John Allyn Smith Sails		save

MOG Editorial Review

On their fourth full-length, Okkervil River continue to bring energetic, tightly packaged indie rock that manages to be hyperliterate while still having a soul. The difference between The Stage Names and anything they’ve released prior is that they’ve broadened their musical palette to include heavier, livelier tracks like “A Hand to Take Hold of The Scene,” and the dramatic hand-clapper “Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe.” At its core, the album is driven by pop culture references, as on “Plus Ones,” which cleverly finds it inspiration in numerically titled pop songs of the past, a sentiment that speaks to the consumerist want for sequels and still feels like a proper love song regardless. On “John Allyn Smith Sails,” a song about suicidal poet John Berryman, Okkervil River even manage to work in their own interpolation of the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B,” further proof that The Stage Names finally finds the Texas band inserting just enough romanticism into their earnest indie pop.
AMG Review of Stage Names

James Christopher Monger
All Music Guide

Okkervil River broke away from the crowded indie rock pack with 2005's superb Black Sheep Boy, a ragged but ornate barroom romp that drank its way to the top of countless year-end lists by finding that thin vein that separates triumph and desperation and hammering as many nails into it as they could in under 50 minutes. Fans used to Will Sheff's visceral, lo-fi caterwauls may be disappointed in the bruised and elegant Stage Names upon first listen, but further spins reveal BSB as more of a stepping-stone than a peak. "It's just a life story/so there's no climax," from the rousing opener "Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe" sets the tone, and its floor tom gallop and volatile whoops sound like an unholy combination of My Aim Is True-era Elvis Costello and Transformer-era Lou Reed spilling out of an old player piano. Sheff has proven himself again and again to be a gifted wordsmith, and Stage Names features some of his finest parlor room romanticisms and slacker-poet observations to date. "Plus Ones," a studied rumination on some of popular music's most beloved numerically titled tracks ("96 Tears," "99 Luftballons," "Eight Miles High," "TVC 15," "7 Chinese Brothers," "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover" etc.) adds an unnecessary integer ("Not everyone's keen on lighting candle 17/The party's done/The cake's all gone/The plates are clean"), cleverly illuminating pop culture's insatiable thirst for sequels and remakes. It's a trick that could easily turn trite in less capable hands, but one of the band's many strengths is its ability to mirror Sheff with arrangements that match the earnestness, wickedness and occasional pomp of the lyrics. Those talents are used most effectively on two of the record's other highlights, the soft and broken "Girl in Port" and the alternately heartbreaking and hysterical "John Allyn Smith Sails," the latter of which chronicles the suicide of poet John Berryman and manages to integrate the Beach Boys' "Sloop John B" so seamlessly that you'd swear it had never existed before. It's not all winsome ballads about backstage passes and gutter bound writers though, as Sheff and company open up the full sneer on "Unless It's Kicks," "You Can't Hold the Hand of a Rock and Roll Man" and "A Hand to Take Hold of the Scene," making Stage Names less of a metaphor for the cinematic lives we wish we could have and more of a reminder that it's us who make the films. [The first 5,000 copies of Stage Names (the "deluxe" edition) came with a bonus disc featuring all of Sheff's demos for the record.]