Okkervil River - Away - VINYL LP

Double vinyl LP pressing. 2013 , the seventh album from the Indie Rock band. The Silver Gymnasium takes place in 1986 in a small town in New Hampshire where Will Sheff grew up. This is a special album for the band as it is Will's first autobiographical record. The album was produced by John Agnello (Kurt Vile, Dinosaur Jr.., John Mellencamp, Cyndi Lauper).

Gibbons, Monteverdi and Willaert represent the high watermark of madrigal writing in England, Italy and the Netherlands respectively. Their subtle marriage of music and text has produced enduring miniature masterpieces of love lost and found and pastoral humour. And there are no shortage of distinguished contemporaries in those countries. But Spain, the home of golden-age polyphony, also had a lively tradition of madrigal composition, too little of which is known beyond native shores. This fine new recording should address that shortcoming. In fact Spain already had a flourishing culture of secular songs in the form of villancicos when Italian composers arrived at royal courts and chapels during the 16th century and bringing with them their own traditions of popular music. Mateo Flecha 'The Younger' was a Catalan, Carmelite monk who showed himself adaptable to this Italian influence in his own book of madrigals, eventually published in Venice and excerpted here. Joan Brudieu (1520-1591) was a Frenchman also living in Catalonia who published madrigals in Spanish and Catalan (both languages represented in this collection). Even less familiar is the name of Pedro Valenzuela - his dates are lost to us - but he uses a sophisticated harmonic vocabulary with acute sensitivity to text in a trio of Italian-texted madrigals. He had emigrated to Italy as a singer at St Mark's in Venice, and he was followed by Sebastián Raval, while Stefano Limido travelled in the other direction. Thus as a whole the collection illustrates a stimulating cross-fertilisation of Spanish and Italian styles in consort music. The performances are both polished and authoritative, attentive to original sources and grounded in a thorough understanding of madrigalian style. Founded by it's director José Duce Chenoll in 2010, the Amystis ensemble already has an impressive catalogue of recordings to it's nam

The goal was to push my brain to places it didn't want to go. The idea was to not have any idea to keep myself confused about what I was doing, frontman Will Sheff says about Okkervil Rivers newest album. The resulting record, I AM VERY FAR, is a startling break from anything this band has done before. By turns terrifying and joyous, violent and serene, grotesque and romantic, it's a celebration of forces beyond our control. On I AM VERY FAR, Sheff emerges not only as a songwriter of the highest caliber, but a producer and arranger of singular vision. Abandoning the tidy conceptual arcs of Okkervil Rivers previous albums, I AM VERY FAR is a monolithic, darkly ambiguous work, one that doesn't readily offer up it's secrets.