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Everything is here: melody, harmony, great lyrics, smart instrumentation and pure emotion. It’s book ended by two of the best songs of the year and everything in between is music gold.
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Wildly alive, majestic and by turns brooding and raucous--often within the same song--The Stage Names burns with all the loneliness and adventure of a never-ending road trip.
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Under The RadarEach song is expertly crafted, with an amazingly punchy set of melodies delivered by an extremely tight band with sometimes larger arangements that never become fussy. [Summer 2007, p. 76]
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With his band's fourth studio album, frontman Will Sheff stakes a claim here for the right to be called the best songwriter working right now.
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Alternative PressThis album truely is a collection of gems. [Oct 2007, p.162]
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Despite its density (they fit worlds into just nine songs), the album remains exciting and accessible, albeit highly sobering.
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The Stage Names is a relatively straightforward roots-rock record, rounded out by clever, pop-culture-obsessed songs.
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Entertainment WeeklyThanks to the fuzzy-folk-rock vibe, Names never feels like an undergrad lit class. [24 Aug 2007, p.133]
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The cerebral lyrics take center stage, as it were, while the band rocks out much harder than it did on 2005's melancholy "Black Sheep Boy."
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The Stage Names is much more of a balls-out rock album than most of Okkervil River's oeuvre, and also more orchestral and layered, with arrangements that include everything from non-sissy glockenspiel to metronome percussion. The complexity is the perfect counterpart to Sheff's dense writing.
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The Stage Names, despite being dense, is rarely difficult and is probably the band's most accessible effort to date.
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On The Stage Names, the band have once again shown themselves to be expert at creating this undeniably sad and powerful indie rock. It’s one of the year’s essential albums.
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The Stage Names is raucous, rambunctious and occasionally quite funny.
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Sheff has proven himself again and again to be a gifted wordsmith, and Stage Names features some of his finest parlor room romanticisms and slacker-poet observations to date.
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Simple, patient, dreary (in a good way) music dominates this soundtrack, providing the perfect accompaniment for Sheff to wail off about doctor and patient sex in a shrink office, society’s pervasive attraction to celebrity and the plights of aging, among other topics.
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Q MagazineSheff's unorthodox, often beautiful songs blend folk and country with left-field rock influences.
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MojoJohn B Sheff's wavering, sometimes overwrought, vocal takes getting used to, but it's worth it for songs like these. [Mar 2008, p.108]
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The urgency is still there, as guitars and pianos take turns screaming during the breakdown, but the violence is replaced with a sense of frivolity and playfulness that lingers throughout the group's fifth release.
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This album comes in a neat package: well-guarded and wry, artists competently displaying their hard-earned skill. It's all very professional, but no more meaningful than the titular appellations, the smile of a persona.
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The Stage Names shares the frenzy of pre–"Black Sheep" songs like 'The War Criminal Rises and Speaks,' and if it isn't as monolithic as the album that spurred the band's rise to "Believer"-subscriber prominence, it does contain several fine examples of hyper-articulate hysteria.
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While this album isn’t as riveting as earlier Okkervil River CDs, there’s plenty to enjoy, and plenty of reason for hope.
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The band's arrangements are still wonderfully unpolished, so while these tunes should please anyone who buys CDs at Starbucks, they still pack some ragged glory of what makes the Austin collective so intoxicating on stage.
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These sad-sack satirists pepper their fourth album with tracks that quicken the pace to anaerobic levels, as frontman Will Sheff liberally shpritzes his microphone while the band gets lathered up like participants in a grade-school dodgeball game.
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SpinSinger/songwriter Will Sheff gives overkill a good name on Okkervil River's fourth album. [Sep 2007, p.136]
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Yes, it's solid rock but what they might lack in glamour (no back up dancers here, dude), they make up for in sheer sincerity.
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As much as I enjoy Stage Names, it will never be as highly regarded as the comparitavely masterpiece Black Sheep Boy, as the songs lack the depth and magnitude needed to influence a much more musically inclined indie fan base.
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The nearly impossible thematic scope attempted and deftly handled here is a tribute to Will Sheff's dexterity and range as a songwriter (if not a vocalist), and the band's chops for being able to keep pace.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 56 out of 64
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Mixed: 4 out of 64
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Negative: 4 out of 64
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Mar 31, 2012
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SaintGodJun 21, 2009
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ConnorG.Jun 18, 2009