Okkervil River - "It Ends With A Fall"

There are a few Okkervil River songs that I like a lot, and a few others that I like significantly less. This is not so unusual, I suppose.

Sheff is undoubtedly a gifted songwriter with a penchant for heartbreaking melody and an uncanny ability to underscore those melodies with subtly blended arrangements. He also manages the impressive feat of writing lyrics that sound like they came into being with the song - not before or after. But sometimes he pushes too hard with his voice, screams over the band, blows apart the confidently written, arranged, performed songs, with uncomfortably, embarrassingly raw vocals. The band is at their best, as in ?It Ends With A Fall,? when the rawness and vulnerability emerge organically from the emotional force of the music. On this track his voice never breaks apart completely, but only wavers, and when it does so, the organs have already made us feel the undoing in our chest. Sheff doesn?t rip out his heart and pummel us with it; he simply shows us something, invites us to empathize, and we do.

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Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band - "Van Dieman's Land"

Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band have in common with the Fairport Convention:

1. A bassist

2. The use of traditional folk-songs of England in combination with rock instrumentation to forge a new kind of music.

3. Jangling guitars.

4. Gifted female vocalists whose voices cut through the rock din and preserved the pastoral feudal Englishness of the songs.

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Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band differ from the Fairport Convention most notably in this way:

Whereas Denny?s voice is clear as day, Collins?s is overcast, cold and mossy. In this way her voice can at first seem more dated, but also communicates something unique in folk-rock. As Alan Lomax put it: ?What comes through is sincerity, purity... Here one occasionally has that rarest of musical experiences - hearing a young girl singing in the house or garden, dreaming of love.?