Photo by:  Todd Wolfson

Another episode of Athenians earning their chatterbox reputations unfolded in front of Seattle-based troubadour Damien Jurado. In his black T-shirt and dark denim jeans, armed with his six-string acoustic, Jurado was the very definition of non-descript. His songs, however, are anything but.

The vivid scenes, delivered in a velvet hush from this one-time punk rocker-turned-school teacher, were mostly ignored by the early arrivers—but those that did bother to bear witness couldn’t feel anything less than affected. The tug boat took broken hearts out to sea during “Denton, TX” (from 2006’s And Now That I’m In Your Shadow), the emotional story of a narrator enamored with a girl that, “has a dad she does not know/Who sends her letters with no return address” who in time disappears from town, while continuing to haunt his heart. During “Letters and Drawings” Jurado strummed with a little more ferocity and his voice filled with a bit more urgency—his intense, sunken eyes appearing to survey the room, but probably blinded by the lone spotlight. The song reminds us that the past is irreversible and nostalgia is nothing more than a mild form of depression.

When rock icon Lou Reed recently name-dropped Austin-based Okkervil River at the MTV Video Music Awards and during an interview with Pitchfork, their ticket to ride was as good as laminated. Multi-instrumentalist Will Sheff, hair precisely unkempt, took the stage with a slew of musicians that had each received the coat and tie memo. Touring in support of the recently released (and critically acclaimed) Stage Names, Okkervil River’s performance was, unfortunately, short on highlights. The freewheeling Southern pop swagger of Cowboy Mouth intercepted by an angst-riddled vibe akin to The Cure at their most annoyingly effusive, combine to make Okkervil’s stage show difficult to endure. The best moment: When the band nailed “No Key, No Plan” and Sheff wailed, “You float up high and it isn’t a sin/And there isn’t a hell where we’ll be sent/ There’s only now, and there isn’t then /So just breath it in.” If only everything else smelled, er, sounded as sweet.