Okkervil River
The Forum Theatre - Melbourne Festival
Friday 14th October 2011
by Joshua Jennings
The anecdote I re-hear on the way to the Okkervil River gig tonight figures. A friend who was on the same flight as the band during their 2009 Australian tour observed frontman Will Sheff sitting alone in the corner at the airport; sullen, headphones on and bunched up over a laptop, while the rest of the band horsed around together some distance away.
It fits with what happens at the Forum tonight. Throughout the course of the 90-odd minute set, Sheff does his thing and the rest of the band members do theirs, together. It does raise some questions pertinent to the nature of tonight’s show: Where would Sheff be without the rest of Okkervil River? And where would the rest of Okkervil River be without Sheff? The answer to the former question is easy: the revolving cast of musicians that have dropped in and out of Okkervil River since the band’s inception nearly 15 years ago shows that the band around Sheff is dispensible. Sheff alone is the nucleus, housing all the trump cards (the crafty songwriting, pertinent lyricism and gutsy performance ethic) up his sleeves. It’s no surprise he’s performing solo shows on this tour. All he really needs to perform his acoustic-driven folk-rock ditties is a guitar. The instrumental bells and whistles that colour the Texan act’s five albums are nice but ultimately cosmetic. Sheff performing raw and bare-boned does no harm to the crux of the Okkervil River premise. You could argue that it even enhances the intimacy of the story-telling.
The latter question of where the remainder of Okkervil River would be without Sheff is more difficult to answer. And this is what is problematic about the spirit of the performance at the Forum. Who knows how these musicians would fare sans Sheff? As performers tonight, they are wall flowers and fluffers; meek and serviceable. Their reservation and repressed demeanour obstructs any insights into the depth of their personality.
Sheff on the other hand proceeds with ice-breaking and ultra-conspicuous psychodramatics from the outset (reasonable enough too, since he is the central focal point after all), performing a number of demonstrative guitar-rock choreography stage moves before his lips even make whispering distance of the microphone. There’s no denying psychodramatics can enhance a performance sometimes — Anton Newcombe from the Brian Jonestown Massacre is an example that comes to mind — but the prerequisite is usually that you need to have a psychological condition to render the desired effect. In the instance of Sheff, he’s too normal – even if a little melancholic and disaffected from time to time. What enacts the tension when Newcombe cuts loose is it's blatantly discernible he can't particularly keep it together no matter how hard he tries. Alternatively, while Sheff is indulging in his psychodramatics, it deflates the tension because it’s blatantly discernible he won't/can’t truly lose it no matter how hard he tries.
But back to the band dynamics tonight. What’s irksome is you feel a little ripped off watching them play out because you’re left to wonder how good things would get (and they’re already certainly good enough) if the rest of the band members too were to be anointed from secondary to primary stage presences. It’s especially wanting of this dynamic shift now the band are playing venues the size of the Forum, where the on-stage action and musicianship requires them to be a hell of a lot bigger and brighter to sustain the engagement of the fans slurping their beer from the comfort of the seats in the back of the theatre.
The group focuses heavily on new album I Am Very Far tonight (the set is otherwise peppered with hits from Black Sheep Boy and the Stand Ins, and a Sloop John B cover too), before an imposing backdrop of the album’s artwork (the art work featuring those menacing red-faced wolf-dog-men that start to look more and more like a bedraggled hybrid of Dennis Wilson and Charles Bukowski as more beer goes down). The grand scale of the backdrop and the usual lighting flourishes instills a favourable air of theatricality and majesty into the performance but while environmental factors buoy the show, there are adverse technical issues.
The more pressing of them is the sound. It’s violently bottom end-heavy for a good whack of the set, to the point of obscuring Sheff’s notably visceral acoustic guitar strumming to near-inaudibility. And that’s on top of muddy vocals, which are a blasphemy when the band everyone is there to see trades heavily on close-spoken lyricism.
Other things don’t quite go to plan either. Like the drunk splayed out on the Forum wood floor while his assailant waits bare knuckled and patiently for him to get back up. Or like Sheff returning to stage post-encore to tell the audience something and discovering his microphone’s off and it’s not coming back on. (UPDATE: See comments section below.) If a little flat, it was at least an eventful gig -- wrong reasons aside.
Joshua Jennings
(Pics: Callum Ponton)