…includes two new, never released songs.
Okkervil River write dreamy songs with slumber-blurred stories and play them with a drifting, somnambulant gait. The band — named for a river outside St. Petersburg, Russia — filled last year’s eye-opening Down the River of Golden Dreams with gentle ballads about beds and war criminals and forgiveness, but the songs on their follow-up EP, Sleep and Wake Up Songs, are more brittle and fragile, like a light sleeper’s snooze. The EP condenses the album’s best qualities and discards most of its weaknesses, and its brevity makes it all the more emotionally forceful.
“Rapt, in Star Wars sheets/ With my hand across your belly/ We waded through the watercolor,” Will Sheff sings on opener “A Favor”. The song…
Tag Archive: Okkervil River
As The Antlers and Okkervil River prepare for another collaborative tour, they’ve released a new live album that collects material from their tour together last year.
The songs on Band Together are “taken from the collaborative portion of the show,” Peter Silberman writes, “where we join forces to become an Antlers-Okkervil supergroup.” He adds, “We spent a lot of time winnowing down the many live recordings from those shows to find the very best performances, and the end result truly gives the feeling of being there.”
Band Together features Silberman and The Antlers’ Michael Lerner, Okkervil River’s Will Sheff and Julian Cubillos, and was recorded in DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Copenhagen.