Okkervil River - The Silver Gymnasium - Alternative - NEW & SEALED CD

Description: Okkervil River - The Silver Gymnasium - Alternative - NEW & SEALED CD - J1398z GENRE:RockLABEL:ATO Online ReviewOkkervil River's first release for the ATO label is a concept album about innocence and youth, showing a kid's first glimpses into the adult world. It's set in the 1980s and comes with a map of Will Sheff’s hometown of Meriden, New Hampshire, showing where each song takes place. The Silver Gymnasium is, in other words, a coming-of-age album: 11 songs that plumb the loss of innocence and youth, a young man’s first glimpses into the adult world of conflict, compromise, and confusion. It’s exactly as cohesive and novelistic as Okkervil river’s last decade’s worth of work, which explored the mythology of rock and roll. In 2005 Black Sheep Boy told a phantasmagorical tale of Tim Hardin’s doomed character (from the song of the same title) coming to pained life, while both 2007’s The Stage Names and 2008’s The Stand-Ins delved further into that world’s rock-and-roll grotesquerie, famously wrenching “Sloop John B” out of Brian Wilson’s hands and casting it as a boat-trip to hell. Rather than romanticize the experience of a life spent in tour vans and on club stages, Sheff presented it as a dark picaresque. This was a different way of writing what he knew, and his fictions were drawn from liner notes, band photos, song lyrics, and the tall tales of backstage crews in small markets. The difference between that string of albums and The Silver Gymnasium is that on this new album Sheff is singing about his own personal mythology, mapping the terrain of his own life, and commemorating (perhaps memorializing) old friends who’ve grown too far apart. Sheff has ostensibly mined this territory before, on early tracks like “Listening to Otis Redding at Home During Christmas” (on the band’s second album Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See) or like “A Favor” (off their 2004 EP Sleep and Wake-Up Songs). But this album represents the deepest he has descended into this material as well as his most sustained examination of his own origins. While not quite as fantastical as previous albums, The Silver Gymnasium avoids the pitfalls of self-absorption and confessionalism; he’s less a participant in these stories than an observer and enabler who understands his own memory is unreliable.

Price: 5.95 GBP

Location: Northampton

End Time: 2025-02-03T16:22:18.000Z

Shipping Cost: 19.6 GBP