MOG

I'm a little behind the mob on this, but if you have not heard Okkervil River's new album The Stage Names yet, what are you waiting for? It's fantastic. Here's a bit from my rushed and not altogether satisfactory review, up today at Dusted: "There's a moment about two minutes into "Our Life Is Not a Movie Or Maybe," the first song on The Stage Names where the band quite simply slips its bonds. Even up to this point, the song has been a coiled spring of melodic energy, its staccato bursts of words caroming against a tense rhythm of clamped guitar and snare shots. It begins to cut loose in the first chorus, in bigger drums and dramatic, flaring vocals, yet it cuts back to nothing. The release, the payoff, the emotional peak comes only later, in a series of rising guitar strums and wordless blurts of vocal sound. At that moment, the song becomes more than a clever arrangement of notes and words (and the words are rather clever, more on that later). It becomes more than an alt.whatever display case for literacy and skill. It becomes a song that conducts joy so transparently, so directly, that it becomes joy itself. It gives me chills every time." (The rest here: http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/3759)

You can download that first song for free here: http://www.scjag.com/mp3/jag/ourlifeisnot.mp3