About this item

With "The Stage Names", Okkervil River dynamite the walls of past release, "Black Sheep Boy"'s gothic, moss-walled castle from the inside to let in the glaring sun. Where "Black Sheep Boy" presented a fairytale of dark babbling streams and high distant towers, "The Stage Names" takes place in an unmistakably modern world, where snowy televisions blast into cheap hotels the spectral images of soap stars endlessly betraying each other, where losers in late-night bars languish to the beat of their favourite songs, where broken-down actresses place their final cell calls from lonely mansions high in the hills. Riddled with characters real and fake, with true-life biography and brazenly fabricated autobiography, with the relics of high culture and the crumpled-up trash of low culture, "The Stage Names" is a cinemascopic take on the meaning of entertainment.