In counterpoint to Surfer Blood's diffident reaction to their limited set time, Okkervil River let everyone know what was up and how they felt about it the moment they took the stage at Flamingo Cantina. Lead singer Will Sheff greeted the audience with a brief rant about self-satisfied public safety authority figures clad in yellow vests with suspicious bulges in their pants, and proceeded to launch into a breakneck thirty minutes of music.
If there was even a moment's break in the music, it was a brief and tense one that saw band members exchanging "okay, whatever" glances and coping with laster-than-last-minute adjustments. On the whole, the pace of the set only did good things for the band, turning a time slot that under normal circumstances might have taken five or six songs to fill into a lightning fast parade of audience favorites like "Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe" and "John Allyn Smith Sails," as well as new songs from their oh-so-soon to be released album, "I Am Very Far."
