Spins

Okkervil River

The Stand Ins

Label: Jagjaguwar

If you like: Smartly fashioned tangles of literate pop

Song to download: "Pop Life"

Every song is a short story for Will Sheff, the singer and songwriter and singer for Okkervil River, a band from Austin, Texas.
Sheff's stories are generally first-person monologues, their drama stoked by his fearlessly disheveled voice —crooning like Morrissey, quavering like David Byrne, cracking, aching. The band matches his mood swings and eggs him on, harking back to the 1960s and '70s for a sound that draws from folk-rock, new wave, country and an occasional stately ballad, sometimes sprinkled with mariachi horns or sleigh bells or banjo.
On the band's new album, The Stand Ins, Sheff, after 10 prolific years recording and touring, is thinking more about the life of a performer. He contemplates all sorts of entertainers and hangers-on — singer-songwriters (there's even a song called "Singer Songwriter"), a movie star, a supermodel, a faded movie star, an actor's fan, a backstage fling and an imagined interview with Jobriath, the 1970s glam-rocker. There's a sailor too, who sings, in "Lost Coastlines," "Every night finds us rocking and rolling on waves wild and white."
Sheff is fascinated by the permeability of truth and deception, and by the way people willingly let themselves be deceived by art's fantasies. The center of the album is "Pop Lie," a frenetically catchy new-wave song about "the man who dreamed up the dream that they wrecked their hearts upon, the liar who lied in his pop song." As self-conscious as the lyrics are, the music is more uninhibited, lurching into motion like a bar band, picking up speed, piling up instruments and letting them fall away.
Okkervil River builds each flimsy illusion as if, for the moment, it's all that matters.

— Jon Pareles
The New York Times

Chris Knight

Heart Of Stone

Label: Red Distribution

If you like: Steve Earle, John Mellancamp, Buddy Miller, James McMurtry

Song to download: "Hell Ain't Half Full"

Singer-songwriter Chris Knight's probing narratives of rural American life led under the radar have in the past generally needed little in the way of musical accompaniment; such is the might of his detailed descriptions and tough/tender voice.

Heart Of Stone, produced with electric guitars blaring by Dan Baird (Georgia Satellites, The Yahoos) may initially startle Knight's longtime fans. Only one song — "Crooked Road," a devastating tale of generational hard times — features Knight alone with an acoustic guitar.
Still, this rocking approach, once digested, shores the desperation and frustration inherent in these songs of good people caught in bad situations, searching for a sense of place. The slash-and-burn guitars echo the conquering harshness of the contemporary world, sitting as they do over sawing fiddles and high-lonesome singing. But the gut-punch comes in Knight's ability to bring humanity to his world-weary, if morally ambiguous, characters. Within the darkness is light.

— Ed Bumgardner
relish staff writer

The Academy Is …

Fast Times At Barrington High

Label: Decaydance/Fueled by Ramen

If you like: Dashboard Confession-al, Panic At The Disco, Metro Station

Song to download: "Paper Chase"

The Academy Is … is not a band built for complexity, so it has trimmed fat for the new Fast Times at Barrington High. Gone are the considered ballads, the bits of falsetto, the nods to new wave and Goth that marked the band's last album. This is a streamlined, plain-spoken album full of breaking hearts and sticky choruses. It's also the band's best.
William Beckett has one of the great voices in emo, and it cuts a bold swath across songs that suggest a hybrid of early Dashboard Confessional and Journey. He's at his best when spurned, as on the vibrant single "About a Girl." Elsewhere, he falls to pieces on "The Test" and learns a girlfriend's secret on "Rumored Nights," the guitars swelling just as his illusions shatter.
This album stumbles only when it strays from formula. On "Coppertone," the album's most ponderous song, Beckett is mired by convoluted lyrics that waver between seductive and self-loathing. If only he'd stop thinking so hard.

— Jon Caramanic
The New York Times

Dead Confederate

Wrecking Ball

Label: TAO Records/Razor & Tie

If you like: Neil Young's guitar squalls, Drive By Truckers, Kings of Leon, Nirvana

Song to download: "The Rat"

The only things that the Georgia rock band, Dead Confederate, shares with, say, Lynyrd Skynyrd, are passion and attitude — two things in ample supply on Wrecking Ball, the band's debut album.
Dead Confederate is a Southern rock band in the same way as Drive By Truckers — a young band from the Dirty South split between the raw blasting-zone ethos of punk and dark, eerie testimonials to a Southern Gothic way of life. The band's songs tackle everything from broken relationships ("Heavy Petting") to raging denouncements of war ("All The Angels") the religious right (the epic "The Rat") to songs rife with personal and professional insecurities.
The anger and despair are conveyed by singer Hardy Morris' drawled, yelping howl and given punch and color by dynamic shifts that move from hellish, reverb-drenched swaths of psychedelia to screeching slashes of guitar and churling organ.

Wrecking Ball is nothing if not evocative, by turns harrowing, squalid, melodic and abrasive — and distinctive.

— Ed Bumgardner
relish staff writer

Gym Class Heroes

The Quilt

Label: Fueled by Ramen/Decaydance

If You Like: Emo hip-hop/rock

Song to download: "Peace Sign/Index Down"

Gym Class Heroes, the rap/rock group from Geneva, N.Y., defies categorization. Instead, the group jumps back and forth between musical styles, never falling, never slipping and always landing.
Travis McCoy, a basketball-tall MC who cites poet Charles Bukowski and artist Robert Crumb as influences, is the charming center of this confection of genre-bending music displayed on the new CD, The Quilt. His battle-rap rhymes ride along rock-edged rhythms that dip also into straight-up hip-hop, reggae, ska and emo.
It shouldn't work but it does, a roller-coaster ride of sound that feels at times like a therapy session and at other times like an alcohol-fueled after-party. McCoy is a nimble narrator of tales that range from his efforts at either long-term romance or one-night stands ("Cookie Jar") to his complicated relationship with his father ("Like Father Like Son").
In this mish-mash of a CD is a beguiling kind of poetry that pulls in listeners rather than pushes them away. This is a beautiful mess of music.

— Michael Hewlett
relish reporter

Giant Sand

proVisions

Label: YepRoc

If you like: Calexico

Song to download: "The Desperate Kingdom of Love"

Howe Gelb recorded proVISIONS, the latest album by his Arizona collective, Giant Sand, in Denmark, combining a Danish rhythm section with contributions by Neko Case, M. Ward and Isobell Campbell.
Europop this is not. Gelb's still serving up the same quirky, compelling tunes, sung in a flat near-whisper, that over 20 years have drawn a small, loyal following to the band — now essentially just Gelb.
The 13 tunes on proVISIONS are among Gelb's best. Topics range from refrigerated freight and complicated mornings to sex and war, with wordplay reminiscent of that used by the young Elvis Costello. While the arrangements tend to be hauntingly sparse, there's plenty of musical variety and creativity. Gelb has fun with rootsy country on "Can Do"; pairs psychedelia with a Latin riff on "Muck Machine"; and showcases guitar squall on the instrumental "World's End State Park."

— Steven Wine
The Associated Press