Okkervil River: Black Sheep Boy [JAGJAGUWAR]

Why you'll love it

This Jagjaguwar LP brings back Okkervil River's third album. It holds a Metacritic score of 86, and Pitchfork placed it at No. 174 on its list of the top 200 albums of the 2000s.

About the album

Plenty of albums open with a cover. Black Sheep Boy builds a whole world out of one. Will Sheff took Tim Hardin's 1960s song "Black Sheep Boy" as his starting point and spun a cycle of songs around a half-mythical character, a voice that turns up in quotation marks across the record. Most of it was written in Bloomington, Indiana, in February 2004, at a time when Sheff was, by his own account, without a home and keeping the band going on very little.

"For Real" is the loud one, a slow burn that boils over, "Black" rattles along with real urgency, and "A King and a Queen" and "So Come Back, I Am Waiting" let the strings and pump organ swell. Jonathan Meiburg of Shearwater adds piano and vocals, Howard Draper plays lap steel and mandolin, and a small string section gives the closer, "A Glow," its widescreen hush. Providence artist William Schaff painted the cover.

Amazon placed it at No. 22 on its top 50 albums of 2005, and the 10th anniversary reissue later stretched it to three discs. This is the original one-disc album, which has the considerable advantage of fitting on the shelf.

Also at Kops: more Okkervil River on vinyl · browse Alternative

Tracklist

Listen

On Jagjaguwar, a reissue of the 2005 album.