Like the proverbial chicken and egg, or cause and effect, or sin and redemption, we’ll probably debate whether music is more or less important than lyrics until the end of time. Music — particularly rock music — is a work of synthesis.  Music, lyrics, performance, and treatment combine to form the song we blare over the headphones we’ve strapped ourselves into for the A.M. commute.  Alter any one of those things and it could all go to hell or be lifted aloft to brilliance.

This is what fascinates about cover songs; we hear a new performance and a different treatment, and frequently new music with the same structure and the same lyrics.  At their best, cover songs muddy up the synthesis we’re used to. By ripping it up, the song gets illuminated in a new way, whether that illumination is newfound humor (as in the Flaming Lips’ cover of “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” or Jonathan Coulton’s white-boy take on “Baby Got Back”) or profound beauty (as in M. Ward’s cover of Daniel Johnston’s “To Go Home”).

Perhaps it is up to each listener which one of these components they want to give prominence to. For my money, though, great lyrics cannot rescue bad music, but bad lyrics can ruin a good song in a heartbeat. Contentious Example Number One: The Hold Steady.  Routinely compared to Springsteen/E-Street, The Hold Steady combine great, inventive, story-song lyrics with bargain basement generic music and a monotone drawl instead of singing. For all of Craig Finn’s lyrical bluster, the music eventually drowns him out.  For Contentious Example Number Two, we have Arcade Fire’s second long-player Neon Bible which features absolutely gorgeous arrangements of songs with ham-fisted imagery and tired sentiments (”MTV, what have you done to me / Save my soul, set me free”), and a treatment that places Winn Butler’s voice so far forward in the mix that the clunky, self-important lyrics become inescapable.

Songs can, of course, survive having substandard music or lyrics or performances or treatments. The Ramones built a career (and totally kicked ass) based on the strength of performance alone. If you don’t believe me, try covering “I Wanna Be Sedated” and see what happens.  It’s a one-way ticket to Disasterville, population: your band.

The hardest feat to pull off is building a song whose music is memorable and whose lyrics can stand on their own.  This is not to say that best songs pull off this feat — “Hey Bulldog” is one of my favorite Beatles’ songs and it’s about absolute rubbish — but it’s certainly one of the hardest things to do. Those songwriters who manage both feats simultaneously tend to rank pretty high on our desert island best-ofs: Elvis Costello, Randy Newman, Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, The Smiths…  Scouring the contemporary music landscape, bands and songwriters that can deliver on the delicate music/lyrics balancing act are few and far between.  Jarvis Cocker is one, Sufjan Stevens another, The Decemberists a third.  Wolf Parade’s Spencer Krug and New Pornographers/Destoryer’s Dan Bejar try very hard to get there and just…barely…miss.

Then there’s Okkervil River.  ”The best band you haven’t heard” is a pretty damn tired way of talking about bands, isn’t it? Ah well, you’re going to have to suffer through another one of those moments.  Okkervil River is the best band you haven’t heard, and they’ve steadily built a large body of work (roughly an album a year for the past few), marrying startling smart and affecting lyrics with folk and country-laden indie rock.

Their latest two albums are worth purchasing and considering at the same time, as they form two halves of one work, with 2007’s The Stage Names as the call, and 2008’s The Stand-Ins as the response.  Both of them explore similar themes to such a recurring extent that they form a loose concept album, exploring questions of authenticity in art and the difficulties of being, being related to, or being in love with an artist while injecting the proceedings with recurring nautical imagery. Will Sheff’s emotive vocals and scalpel-precise lyrics anchor the whole project, which mixes passion and ambiguity in such equal measure that it becomes impossible to know what to think when it’s done.

Part of this troubling ambiguity comes from the albums having different perspectives on the same questions.  The Stage Names frequently expresses frustration with life’s inability to live up to the structure, beauty, and meaning of art.  This is most clearly expressed on “Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe,” the album’s mini-masterpiece of an opening track. In the song, Sheff chronicles the many ways that the everyday is a lot more disappointing than cinema.  “It’s just a life story, so there’s no climax / no more new territory, so put away the Imax,” he snarls, only to dip into more surreal territory with the next couplet: “In the slot that you sliced through the scene there was no shyness/ in the plot that you passed through your teeth there was no pity,” only to veer into references to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It takes quite a crooner to be able to pull off an angsty song about how much life sucks compared to art that references John Hughes films and make it work, but somehow Sheff manages.

Sheff’s voice is probably the most immediate barrier to getting into Okkervil River.  He sounds an awful lot like the lead singer of The Killers, and he is really unafraid of over-emoting to get the point across.  His vocal style raises the very same questions about authenticity that his lyrics do: it’s so obviously a put-on performance that, on first listen, you might think him a poser.  But he’s not…or rather he’s not any more than any other rock star is; he’s just unafraid of showing the strings behind the marionette.

While The Stage Names is often frustrated by real life not measuring up to art, The Stand-Ins courses with disgust in its veins about the lies of art and the lying liars who tell them.  Each song on the first album has its companion piece on the second. While The Stage Names gives us the song ”Unless its Kicks,” which declares that music is “a lie / But I’ll still give it my love,” The Stand-Ins gives us “Pop Lie,” in which Sheff’s audible disgust drenches couplets about “the liar who lied in his song / and you’re lying when you sing along.”  The Stage Names presents contempt at the rock lifestyle with “You Can’t Take the Hand of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Man” only to have The Stand-Ins respond with ”Singer Songwriter,” a folk-rock stomper in which Sheff lacerates an unnamed musician who “comes from wealth” and “got taste / what a waste that that’s all that you have.”

The question has to be asked, however: How “authentic” is Sheff’s insistence on authenticity?  After all, “Singer Songwriter” is, at its heart, a litany of names and concepts, including Artaud, Angkor Wat, The Kinks, Edgar Allen Poe, Outsider Art, and the Gospel of Thomas. Hell, Okkervil River’s name is a reference to an obscure short story by a Russian author whose work is collected only in New York Review of Books reissues. In order to fully appreciate Sheff’s takedown (or to write it), one must have at least dabbled in the worlds of taste wealth and privilege that Sheff seeks to attack. “Pop Lie,” for all its decrying of the phoniness of rock music, is the single poppiest, most danceable and sing-a-longable track Okkervil River has ever written. It’s got a keyboard line that could be played by The Cars and a pounding acoustic guitar line that’s straight-up Springsteen. There’s more than irony in this; Sheff’s song about how music lies is itself a lie; the liar who lies in his song is, to some extent, him, just as the empty rockstar “you” that Sheff repeatedly sings his songs to could just as easily be himself.

These themes even bleed into the promotional campaign for the new album.  The Stand-Ins is being promoted on YouTube by using stand-ins.  Okkervil River has invited various friends and colleagues to record videos of themselves covering the songs on the album; most cleverly, perhaps, Zykos performs on “On Tour With Zykos,” another song about a dirtbag, womanizing rock star sung from the perspective of a woman he has abandoned after a one-night stand.  The first music video for their song “Lost Coastlines” features a performance by people with TV screens on their faces that project images of the band.  When the performance is over, they take off their TV heads to reveal they’re actually middle-aged businessmen who high-five each other for pulling off the ultimate coup of rock inauthenticity.

In a way, The Stage Names and The Stand-Ins are the rock music equivalent of Orson Welles’s F For Fake or Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying. It is very rare for a rock band to put highfallutin’ ideas like these at the center of their art.   It is even rarer for them to express them through clever, literate, and precise lyrics. That they are able to transmute these meditations into beautifully catchy, danceable, alt-country tunes is just short of miraculous.

Both albums contain mirror image final tracks, both of which are about the lives and deaths of real life artists who themselves practiced their art under pseudonyms.  On The Stand-Ins, the final track tackles obscure American glam rocker (and first openly gay rock star) Jobriath on “Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979.”  Campbell — whose brief career as a high-profile recording artist rapidly crashed and burned and who died of AIDS in 1983 — looks at his failure and tries to ride away from himself on the morning starship he sang about on his first album.

While ”Bruce Wayne Campbell” is a wryly affecting and gorgeously played song, it cannot really compare to the final track on The Stage Names, which accomplishes something that should be impossible.  The song, “John Allyn Smith Sails,” is about suicide, specifically the suicide of its title character, better known under the stage name (get it?!) John Berryman.  Berryman, a poet and an alcoholic of mythic proportions, lived under the shadow of his father’s suicide until he threw himself off of a bridge, only to miss the water and suffocate on the frozen shoreline.  There’s no redemptive art for John Allyn Smith, and his life of lying expertly doesn’t help him. All that’s left is self-destruction, starting with the song’s first lines: “By the second verse, dear friends, my head will burst, my life will end / So I’d like to start this off by saying, Live and Love,” only to progress through references to Smith’s life story and gradual defeat by the world. Then the song does something remarkable. Just as Sheff sings of flying into the winter sun and utters, “My friends, I’m gone”, the strings take a little jump in the melody, only to have the song crash-land into a suicide-themed reworking of “Sloop John B.”

It’s worth mentioning again that there is no way — absolutely no way — that this maneuver should work.  There is no way that, in the middle of a song about the suicide of an American poet, veering into a traditional song made famous by The Beach Boys should work.  It should end in the listener scrunching their face into a “wtf?!” grimace and turning the CD off. Yet, thanks to pounding snare drums, thundering acoustic guitar, and full-throated vocals from the entire band, ”John Allyn Smtih Sails” lifts up and turns into a transcendent, heartbreaking song. It’s a song that captures everything that is worth reckoning with about the art of Okkervil River — a song dense in thematic content and allusion, filled with clever rhymes, moving music, and absolutely no fear of the grandiose.

Okkervil River is not my favorite band — that title is currently split between Talking Heads and Spoon — but they are well worth the time and energy. The music is catchy, it grabs you and doesn’t let go, while Sheff’s lyrics reward consistent replays and closer and closer listening.  Each song is a little puzzle, and the closer you, the listener, get to putting the pieces together, the more moving, beautiful, strange, and funny each song gets.  They may be the liars lying in their songs, and I may be lying when I sing along, but if this is lying, I don’t want to be honest.

Isaac Butler lives in Brooklyn, blogs about culture and politics, and wishes he could write good lyrics.