As exciting as the term sounds, a supermoon is a fairly common occurrence, an illusion caused when a full or new moon happens to coincide with the moon’s closest approach to Earth. Basically, it means the moon looks a bit bigger than usual. While that might not seem significant to most people, it’s the type of phenomenon Sean Carey pays close attention to. Even more so than his brother in flannel Justin Vernon, whom he backs in Bon Iver, Carey syncs his music to the rhythms of nature. His writing process frequently involves hiking or fishing, and in his spare time he photographs mountainous terrains and forests, likening the images to his songs. Yet for all his wilderness worship, there’s often been a disconnect between Carey’s naturalistic mindset and his production-heavy recordings. Both of his albums were pieced together from meticulous overdubs, while his 2012 Hoyas EP pulsed with electronic texture. His songs sought to capture nature’s warmth, but they wore the stamp of cold technology.
With his Supermoon EP, recorded during a supermoon last August, Carey aims to bring his music closer to the natural world that inspired it, scaling back his precise arrangements to let the songs speak for themselves. That’s a noble goal, if not necessarily a wise one. Last year’s Range of Light proved Carey a stronger composer than lyricist, and although he’s got a capable enough falsetto, his voice never demands the spotlight the way Vernon’s does. So his decision to dedicate four of Supermoon’s six songs to downsized remakes of album tracks is a head scratcher: He’s removing much of what made these songs interesting in the first place. "We Fell", a highlight from Carey’s 2010 debut All We Grow, is reprised here without its radiant choral swells, while Range of Light’s luxuriously jazzy "Fire-scene" is reworked as a lonely piano dirge. They’re still the same songs; there’s just less of them now.
EPs made up mostly of alternate versions are usually a tough sell, but if done right they can free an artist to play against type in amusing ways. The most successful are the ones that drastically reinvent their material, recasting, for instance, rock songs as synth-pop songs, synth-pop songs as rock songs, or busy twee-punk as slightly less busy acoustic twee-punk. But Supermoon never takes those kinds of leaps. If it’s been a while since you’ve heard the original versions of these songs you might not notice any differences. Even "Bullet Proof… I Wish I Was", the Radiohead cover that closes the EP, clings stubbornly close to its source material. Rather than pick a Radiohead song he could deconstruct, Carey started with one that was already broken down.
Just one of Supermoon’s revised takes improves on the original: "In the Stream", a lovely number that lost the plot on All We Grow during a busy climax. Freed from the clutter, the song’s rueful sentiment comes through much more clearly. One marginally improved song isn’t enough to justify an EP, though, nor is Supermoon’s lone original, its title track, a solo piano offering with no secrets to reveal. Like the rest of the EP, the song radiates tranquility and comfort without doing much else. Carey has rarely sounded more in his element. Unfortunately, he’s also never sounded less distinguished.
