Okkervil River

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More About

• Will Sheff
• Will Oldham
• Joel R.L. Phelps
• Jeff Mangum
• Visual Arts

There's a kind of tiredness that slinks up your legs and into your stomach, tendrils of fatigue that twine around your spine before plunging deep into your midbrain. It's along this same path that Okkervil River flows. Sleep and Wake-Up Songs is a gorgeous five-track somnambulation through watercolors and Star Wars bedsheets, a pine-cone-scented dream that breathes the same foggy oxygen as Will Oldham, Jeff Mangum and Joel R.L. Phelps. Leader Will Sheff strums lush songs full of shaded memories and spiraling melancholy, all laced with the acidic tang of lap steel, trumpet and Wurlitzer organ. Sometimes music ignites and inspires, but Sleep softly whispers everything you already know, a reaffirmation of man's static numbness that makes it all the more easy to succumb to the hushed paralysis of slumber.