St Pancras Old Church, London
There is something not quite right about Will Sheff playing a solo show. Across six albums – the latest, I Am Very Far, is released in May – his band Okkervil River have blossomed into a thrillingly dynamic outfit who embed their leader's prolix, perspicacious lyrics in muscular rhythms and surprisingly playful melodies. Reduce the accompaniment to a handful of chords and a whisper of harmonica, and you lose much of what makes Okkervil River enticing.
So this gig in a cramped church is a strange way for Sheff to start promoting I Am Very Far – but, as is evident from the plethora of songs he has written disparaging the "lie" of rock music, Sheff has little time for the usual ways in which bands proceed. He plays some of those songs tonight: Unless It's Kicks bristles furiously, Title Track roars. As words pour from Sheff in torrents, you appreciate the advantage of seeing him without the full band. An acoustic setting strips all distractions from Sheff's poetry, allowing us to appreciate its density and opulence, the layering of imagery, the elegant construction of each line.
Dressed in a tweed jacket with elbow patches like a poet-academic, Sheff seems to know exactly how good a lyricist he is. But perhaps he is just mirroring the avid attention of his crowd. The tension in the room when he performs A Stone is acute: he sings in anguish of unrequited love, and every word cuts to the bone. When he hurtles to the piano for an impromptu encore of For Real, seeing Sheff play solo becomes the stuff of dreams.