Okkervil River
Don't Fall In Love With Everyone You See

Falling in love with everyone you meet in life is, without a doubt, a rather dangerous tendency: the Okkervil River are keen to remind us of this. Falling in love with them, on the other hand, is a risk you can pleasantly indulge in. Texans from Austin, led by Mister Will Sheff, have been offering for some years now a simple folk-rock, devoid of frills, but intense, combining Bob Dylan, Nick Cave, and Bright Eyes. This album, released in 2002, might be their best work. Sit in an armchair, let the songs flow: it will feel like you're sitting on a chaise-longue, perhaps on a wooden veranda overlooking the countryside.

Nine songs of melancholy, senses of freedom, joys lived under oblique lights, spread across vast plains. The faces are familiar, the intimacy of a kitchen comforts, even if in the country there's the drunkard who lets you glimpse the skewed dimension of life, or the murderer who grins while surrounded, and all those outcasts with whom you feel you have in common, if not life, its dirty vision. The album opens with a masterpiece: it's called "Red", a sweet and poignant song to the mother, between regrets and small frustrations. Acoustic guitar, a brushed drum, and a flute that fills the gaps between the verses with ancient notes. The piece ends up smelling like an intimate homecoming on one of those twilight Sundays, the ones they teach you about in school: sad, a bit cloudy, in a still cold, shy, and melancholic spring, where you go to visit your mother (or the memory of her) with a bouquet of violets. When that flute comes in, nostalgia sends shivers down your spine.

"Kansas City" is an evocative piece between country and folk, with a Dylan-inspired harmonica and Sheff flaunting a drawl akin to Cave. Even more Cave is present in the dark notes of "My Bad Days", an abysmal plunge into the distortions of bad days, in thoughts that tear and dilate things when they don't go well: the pain is laid bare, rubbed raw by a mocking cello, overexposed by a very slow rhythm. The suffering becomes misshaped, loses measures, like Dostoevsky. When the worst enemy becomes the door knob. "Lady Liberty" and "Westfall" are more lively pieces: the former is enriched with brass, while the latter tells the story of a murderer, embellished with the embroidery of a picaresque mandolin: the song halfway through feels like a train with the entry of drums, and at the scream of "Evil don't look like anything" you feel an urge to sweep away the home ornaments. Even more convulsive is "Dead Dog Song", where Sheff's voice comes through with effects and the driving rhythm takes directions not at all vaguely country. Across prairies.

The acoustic slowdown of "Listening To Otis Redding At Home During Christmas", with its still delightful lyrics ("Home is where beds are made and butter is added to toast. On a cold afternoon you can float room to room like a ghost"), speaks of a crumbled America in the countryside, or nestled in the exile of metropolitan buildings. Remember the Christmas tale that closes the movie Smoke? I'd lay it right there, like a sheet on a new bed. Then there's the wild state folk of "Happy Hearts" and "Okkervil River Song", which evoke taverns and grassy shores.

If when the album ends you can still distinguish the fixtures of your home, the chandelier, and the TV, never mind: Okkervil are not for you. By this hour, if you'd liked them, you'd only see tobacco fields and lost villages in the boundless spaces of Okkervillian America. With the Decemberists, undoubtedly among the best interpreters of the genre: the compromise between singer-songwriter music and indie-rock lies perhaps, magically, in the folds of this timeless melancholic folk.