Fame’s fleeting, fandom’s fucked; they’re both fabrications. Those are the tenets upon which Okkervil River’s The Stand Ins (and its putative prequel, last year’s The Stage Names) is based. Mostly made up of material recorded during sessions for the earlier album, The Stand Ins is a heady, wordy tumble through the lives of characters struggling with artistic performance anxiety. Lyrically, the disc may even outshine its predecessor; songwriter Will Sheff folds in precise references that establish the distinct voice of the speaker in every track: “You’ve got outsider art by an artist who arguably kidnapped a kid on the wall,” he sneers in “Singer Songwriter.” A fallen pop idol plays in a food court; a man reflects on his famous ex, whose smile “shines from the glossy magazine that’s stuck inside the Sunday Times.”
Marvellous gripping yarns, all. But The Stand-Ins falters musically, failing to match either the disconcertingly ominous darkness of Black Sheep Boy or the bristling immediacy of The Stage Names. It’s bookended by two superlative tracks, the call-and-response anthem “Lost Coastlines” (which could be Chapter Two of Stage Names’ “Unless It’s Kicks”) and eerie closer “Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979,” in which the buzzing woodwinds and strings mimic the froggy quaver of Sheff’s voice. Elsewhere, Sheff just sounds tired, his vocals submerged by the country twang, big brass or Yacht Rock pianos of these overstuffed arrangements.