Okkervil River: Golden Opportunities 2, Overboard & Down...

At the end of November, Okkervil River released another free EP of covers titled Golden Opportunities 2, which included the wistful and buoyant "It Is Nice To Get Stoned." Since that time, I have been on a steady diet of Will Sheff and company. In my process of rediscovering Okkeril River's catalog, I sought out rarities I had previously missed, chiefly Overboard & Down EP, a small collection of tracks from the group's Australian tour in 2006. I marveled at the rawness of emotion and melancholy in "Love to a Monster," the sad jangle of the mandolin completing the tender wound. The song begins with a verse that is as stark and distressed as any: "Lover, now that you've left me, I'm glad you're unlovely/Because if you could take all the heat in your heart and just hang it from you/I wouldn't be able to bear the way you cannot love me/It's much easier of me to make a monster out of you."

Far and away, the album I enjoyed from start to finish and enjoyed time after time, was Black Sheep Boy. Those eleven tracks encapsulate what I find so captivating and appealing about Okkervil River. The album drifts between frantic, steep layers of vigor and more hushed moods in "Get Big" and "A King and A Queen." In each instance, however, Sheff's vocals are delivered with palpable feeling of distress and grief, hovering on the edge of hysterics. Simply put, it is the perfect introductory album to initiate your love affair with Okkervil River.

Sharon Van Etten "A Crime"

For whatever reason, when I hear Sharon Van Etten I am transfixed, straining forward to listen with a heightened inspection. With talents that stretch far beyond the cookie-cutter folk singer formula, Van Etten's lyrics are simultaneously robust, uncomplicated, and gut-wrenchingly personal. Her 2010 album Epic is filled with intimate narratives that are both remarkably beautiful and staggeringly heartbreaking. One can only hope that her upcoming album Tramp features more of the same.

Josh Ritter, "Lillian, Egypt"

Somehow, after more than a decade's worth of releases, Josh Ritter continues to fly under the mainstream radar. I simply cannot fathom why. Taken from Ritter's fourth studio album The Animal Years, "Lillian, Egypt" is an exemplary embodiment of Ritter's talents. The songwriting is clever and heartfelt, and when put to music it flows and blends with the measured percussion and slightly jagged, serrated electric guitar riff.

There is an old time feel to the lyrics and the song on the whole, as the music video will further illustrate. Ritter discusses the woman he pines for as being "The daughter of the biggest big town banker/He kept her like a princess/I stole her like the Fort Knox gold." In the last verse, a jangling piano solo that conjures images of silent films precedes a further bolstering the damsel in distress anecdote, with the line: "The last time I saw her she was tied to the train tracks."

With this song, Ritter reaches back into America's past in order to appropriately articulate his feelings in the present world. This is not unusual when considering that his self-designed major during college was titled "American History Through Narrative Folk Music."

My Morning Jacket, "Movin' Away"

Jim James' voice always gives me shivers. The atmospheric drifting of guitar only adds to this sensation on "Movin' Away," the closing track from their recent album Circuital. For most of the song, the piano chords are struck in regimented fashion, paralleled by soothing percussion, but towards the finish these notes spiral away into some sleepy melody. All this is fitting, as James dreamily coos about moving forward and yet wistfully holds on to his past. Two beautiful verses, punctuated by James' chilling vocals, define these sentiments: "Don't know quite why/But I was feeling unsatisfied/I had to get out now/Try to find it," and "Possessed by your love/Under the influence/And though there's a new lifeline/I won't forget the one I left behind."

No Age "Skinned"

We're going to start fresh, and we're going to start slowly and small.

Today's random track of the day, taken from my ever-expanding iTunes library is No Age's "Skinned," off their 2010 album Everything in Between. On this most recent album more than ever, the punk duo are a bit of a paradox. The guitars offer a distorted fizzle and twinge and the drums thump and pound away, often with abandon. The lyrics, delivered by drummer Dean Spunt, are commonly unadorned and direct, but not without substance. Yet, there is a measure of orchestration and purposeful direction in the way these tracks are laid out. These songs are at time both raw, and decadently layered and expansive.

There is quite a lot of sound coming from these two gents. Enjoy, and stay tuned.