Okkervil River - I Am Very Far (Album)

On Okkervil River's latest release, I Am Very Far, front man and songwriter Will Sheff has said his goal was to "push my brain to places it didn't want to go. The idea was to not have any idea - to keep myself confused about what I was doing". The result is a record which encompasses numerous music genres and instruments, while still managing to keep a sense of unification.

I Am Very Far is an incredibly polished and layered album. The majority of the eleven tracks are coated in copious amounts of instrumentation, creating a very lush and rich sound, but at times giving the songs very little breathing space.

With almost three-quarters of the album's tracks clocking in at over four minutes, the album felt too long, despite the fact that it only reaches fifty minutes long. In the second half of I Am Very Far, there are several orchestral ballads which tend to build slowly, such as "Hanging From a Hit", meaning your attention has wandered before the song has reached its peak.

Album opener "The Valley" does its job of grabbing your attention with its stomping rhythm and shouted lyrics that create a violent image: "We watch the sun switching in the sky, off and on/ Where our friend stands bleeding on the late summer lawn/ A slicked back bloody black gunshot to the head/ He has fallen in the valley of the rock and roll dead".

I Am Very Far sounds best during the no-holds-barred rock tracks, such as the rollicking "Rider", or when it takes a different direction altogether, like the R'n'B tinged "Piratess".

Despite providing an album of varied genres, I Am Very Far feels weighed down by its slower songs. They bring the pace of the album down and take away from the songs that would otherwise stand-out as brilliant tracks.

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