Okervill River’s ‘In The Rainbow Rain’ Is The Album Of The Week

The Colorado Sound Album Of The Week

This week, our album of the week is from Austin’s Okkervill River. In The Rainbow Rain is their follow up to 2016’s Away. The album will be out Friday, April 27 on ATO Records.

So far, three singles from the In The Rainbow Rain have been released. “Don’t Move Back To LA” is a sun-bleached, jangly call to lead singer Will Sheff’s friends to stay put. In a release ahead of the song, Sheff wrote that “a bunch of my best friends all moved to LA and I was really sad about it so I wrote a song about how I didn’t want them to leave.”

New Sounds, New Subjects

“Pulled Up The Ribbon” is full of synths and ringing guitar, foreshadowing new terrain for the band. In a press release, Okkervil River billed the album as a departure. “In the Rainbow Rain is full of dazzling color, spattered with starbursts of electric guitar, big blooms of synth, and a chorus of backing vocals. It’s a buoyant and playful record, but also open and emotionally vulnerable,” it reads.

Opening the album is what is sure to be one of the first songs ever written about tracheotomies. “Famous Tracheotomies” begins on an autobiographical note, with Sheff singing, “I was one and a half/ I was my parents’ only kid, and they had lost two before that.”

The song then turns into a glam-rocking paean to celebrities who’ve had tracheotomies, including Ray Davies of The Kinks and Dylan Thomas. Following the reference to Davies, the band pays homage to The Kinks with the melody from “Waterloo Sunset”.

Okkervill River will be hitting the road to support the album, starting April 21 in New York. The Colorado Sound Presents… Okkervill River at the Bluebird Theater on June 8. You can still get tickets to that show, which features Star Rover.