Album Review: Volcano Choir- Repave
It seems like Justin Vernon is willing to do anything if it
will get him out of making another Bon Iver record. I mean, he was quoted
saying this last year—“ I look at it like
a faucet. I have to turn it off and walk away from it because so much of how
that music comes together is subconscious or discovering. There’s so much
attention on the band, it can be distracting at times. I really feel the need
to walk away from it while I still care about it. And then if I come back to it
– if at all – I'll feel better about it and be renewed or something to do that.”
Of course his label went into spin mode and said he just
meant they were taking time away after spending two years writing, recording,
and touring in support of Vernon’s commercial breakthrough Bon Iver, Bon Iver.
In the wake of this, he’s gone on to record with a band he
formed seven years ago, The Shouting Matches—a bluesy bar-rock outfit that drew
little to no attention when they dropped the LP Grownass Man earlier this year. Now Vernon has resurrected another
seemingly one-off project: the “experimental” band he formed four years ago
with the members of the post-rock group Collections of Colonies of Bees. In
2009, they released Unmap, a mostly
forgettable effort, save for the catchy and bizarre lead single, “Island, IS.”
Volcano Choir has returned with their second full length—Repave. And whereas Unmap was uneven at best, with many of the songs coming off as
rough sketches or unfinished ideas, Repave
is pretty much a Bon Iver record. It’s huge and expensive sounding. The
sheer magnitude of it is very reminiscent of my first listen of the
aforementioned Bon Iver, Bon Iver—although
now, arriving two years later, it comes off as slightly less impressive.
The reason that Bon
Iver was such a shock to hear was how far Vernon had come—in popularity, as
well as a songwriter—in a four year period of time. Self-released in 2007,
reissued by Jagjaguwar the following year, the story behind For Emma, Forever Ago is that of legend
by now—recorded in a remote hunting cabin in Wisconsin, during the winter
following Vernon’s band breaking up, as well as a split with a girlfriend. Its
lo-fi, sparse arrangements and raw sound made it an honest and original record.
2008 was when Vernon’s stock began to rise—venues got larger,
the Volcano Choir side project, his involvement in the Minneapolis lite-FM
homage act GAYNGS, the Kanye West cosign in 2010, and then of course, the 2011
release of Bon Iver, Bon Iver, and
all of the success that followed.
By now, something this huge in sound is just what we've come
to expect from Vernon. And it maybe shows that this is how he’s writing
material now. Brushing this off as being no different from Bon Iver is a
dangerous argument however, and one could draw parallels between what the
difference is in Thom Yorke’s day job in Radiohead, and his current stint in
the “don't call us a supergroup” outfit Atoms For Peace.
Although I strongly argue that there is a big different
between those two. And maybe some impassioned Justin Vernon fanboy will correct
me and point out all the subtle differences between Volcano Choir and the
current incarnation of Bon Iver, but after playing Repave many times through, I couldn't tell them apart.
Out of the nine tracks on Repave, some of them are just SO triumphant and grand, they run the
risk of all sounding exactly the same. In fact, the first four songs are
relatively interchangeable with one another, as far as their overall vibe—quiet
moments that build and eventually explode into loud moments, shouty refrains,
falsetto, “experimental” guitar noodling, one word song titles, etc.
And really, all eight songs on Repave—there’s really nothing special about any of them; nothing to
distinguish one from the other. It’s pretty much 40 minutes of the same thing.
Occasionally something you'll hear a rise in the sound and you'll perk up, but
then it goes away, and it’s all too easy to check out completely and let this
become background music. The problem with Repave
is that I know that it’s just not the kind of record I’m going to come back to.
(J.V, just kicking back and phoning in most of this album)
I think I also may have that problem with Vernon’s work as
Bon Iver. I don't remember the last time I threw on For Emma, Forever Ago, but I recently played the first side to Bon Iver—the first five songs making a
run that’s nearly untouchable. It’s the flip side that gets a little boring and
self-indulgent. I did this an as experiment to see if it would hold my
interest, while I was still grappling with this Volcano Choir record. For the
most part it did, but after “Michicant” finished up, I thought “well, that was
fun,” and then I removed it from my turntable.
I started writing this piece a few weeks ago, listening to
the album over and over again, waiting for it to “click,” if you will, or at
least trying to make myself like it more, or attempting to look for something I
missed in the previous listen.
In that time, “Comrade,” the album’s third track, has been
released as a single, and from up on high, was bestowed with the honor of “Best
New Music” from purveyors of all things cool, Pitchfork. A very talented PK
staff writer named Ian Cohen must have been looking over my shoulder prior to
writing his brief review of the song—
“Whether he was
tossing back some brewskis with the Shouting Matches, in it during the Yeezus
sessions, trading notes with Alicia Keys, or working with Kathleen Edwards,
Justin Vernon has worked very hard to prove he's having too much fun with his
friends to work on a third Bon Iver album, and the new Volcano Choir album,
Repave (out September 3 in the U.S. and September 2 internationally via Jagjaguwar),
drives that point home.”
He then goes on to say little about the song, or why it’s
the “BEST” new music—the expression “arena-ready” is used, however. So take
that however you want to.
I find myself saying this a lot around here, but Repave is certainly not a bad record.
You can tell that Vernon and company spent a lot of time working on it. I'm
uncertain what it is, but there’s something preventing me from connecting with
this album in any way, other than at a very surface level. You want to root for
it—specifically the first half: “Tiderays,” “Acetate,” “Comrade,” and
“Byegone.” Each of them written to have an anthemic feel to them, each one
growing larger in scale than the former.
Then you’ve got the unabashed earnestness of “Dancepak” and “Keel,”
where Vernon is singing his motherfucking heart out, and finally the album’s
closing track, “Almanac,” where all of the elements from the seven prior songs
come together and then crash down upon you.
None of these are bad songs; they are just very middle of
the road to me, and really, are just unoriginal. Many of them sound like the
kind of thing you might you will hear on NPR, or on 89.3 The
Current—Vernon, possibly inadvertently, primarily catering to his demographic
of the white middle class, with an average age of around 35.
I think part of the problem that is keeping me from liking
this album is how impersonal the lyrics can be. I guess if you were looking for
one true difference between Vernon’s work with Volcano Choir and with Bon Iver—lyrics
would be it. The lyrics in Bon Iver material are incredibly personal—the phrase
from “Holocene,” “I was not magnificent,” comes to mind.
In contrast, the lyrics to Volcano Choir material are
nonsensical at times, and just seem to take a backseat to making the song
sound as big as possible—like on “Bygones,”—where Vernon drops “sexing up your Parliaments.”
What the fuck does that even mean? Like are we talking about George Clinton?
Are we talking about the British political system? Are we talking about the cigarettes
with the recessed filter?
In the end, Repave
comes off as the kind of record for the fans Vernon gained in a post-2011 world—number
two album in the country, Grammy gold, sold out shows, custom sneakers, whiskey
endorsement deals, etc. It’s a record that won't necessarily alienate people
who have been following him since the early days, but it’s weighed down in
enough excess that it may leave some listeners scratching their heads.
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