Chris Vognar

It's hard to tell if Okkervil River singer Will Robison Sheff is drunk when he performs. He's not in any way sloppy, or slurring, but he always appears intoxicated by his music, throwing himself into each tune through vocal wails and undulating motion. When the frontman feels it so intensely, the easiest thing to do is follow suit.

The Austin-based Okkervil brought its indefinable passions to the Granada on Saturday night and showed that the best sounds still fall outside the realm of easy classification. The lyrics blended sorrow and glory, often in the same breath. The dark, aching ballads launched effortlessly into anthemic rock, with strains of everything from Motown grooves to alt-country twang. The one constant was a firm command of the material and the crowd.

If you don't know Okkervil, please familiarize yourself. Their most recent album, The Stage Names, was among the best of 2007, a mighty package of dry, knowing wit and crack musicianship that gets better with every listen.

At a time when so much seems to sound like so much else, the River boys earn perhaps the most coveted adjective in pop music: unique. But there's also something comfortably familiar here, the cozy feeling of pitch-perfect songwriting that gets you both humming and thinking.

On Saturday some of the best songs delved into the ways we consume culture, but they never resorted to cultural cliché. The ballad "Plus Ones," for instance, explores the inadequacy of love songs, or at least the question of what happens when the song is over: "No one wants a tune about the 100th luftballon that was seen shooting from the window of your room." The slow-rising rocker "Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe," with its gospel-tinged chorus and discordant bridge, zooms in on the disconnect between life on the ground and on the screen: "It's just a life story, so there's no climax/No more new territory, so pull away the Imax."

More important, Okkervil understands how to set a lonely twang or a piquant trumpet blast against the roar of three guitars snarling in unison. It's hard to describe great rock 'n' roll. But when you hear "Unless its Kicks," the liveliest jam from Saturday night's set, you know you're in its presence.