One of the profound truths we learned from the post-Grammys Who Is Bonnie Bear? meme is that there's still a good deal of confusion about whether "Bon Iver" is a guy or a band. It's understandable: The Walden-esque tale of Justin Vernon's isolation while recording For Emma, Forever Ago is now the stuff of legend, but in the years since he's assembled a legion of quietly formidable collaborators who have helped flesh out the Bon Iver sound. Among them is former music student and fellow Wisconsinite Sean Carey. After first hearing For Emma on Myspace in 2007, legend has it that Carey spent two weeks in his bedroom figuring out all the songs' percussion parts and harmonies. Booked as the opener for one of Vernon's early Bon Iver shows, Carey sang some Emma songs backstage and Vernon asked him to join the band that night. While this story doesn't exactly have the mysterious allure of Vernon's whole cabin-in-the-woods creation myth, it does pretty accurately capture Carey's role in the band: the talented yet dutiful behind-the-scenes guy with an ear for deconstructing arrangements.
Carey's first solo offering, the ambient-inspired folk of All We Grow, was a muted rustle of a record, and what it lacked in the strong vocal and storytelling elements of Bon Iver's music it made up for in elegantly realized arrangements and a warmed-breeze atmosphere. But if All We Grow had the benevolent glow of a Wisconsin sunset, Carey's new EP, Hoyas, sounds like a soundtrack for an ice-slicked, insomniac winter drive. Blending mumbled folk and bleary-eyed blips, lead-off track "Two Angles" sounds like the Postal Service might have if Jimmy Tamborello's tapes had gotten lost in the mail and accidentally ended up on Phil Elverum's doorstep. Muffled by a fog of gently distorted guitar chords, pulsating synths, and horns that sound so distant it's like they were plucked from somebody else's dream, Carey's voice never raises above a whisper.
Vocals and lyrics are usually the least compelling elements of Carey's music. The guy's definitely not a bad singer, he's just not a terribly distinct one, and on Hoyas, he proffers an interesting-- if kind of low-hanging-- solution to this problem: How about some Auto-Tune? All of the tracks except for "Two Angels" feature the sort of vocals that can't help but recall the Bon Iver's Kanye-famous a cappella track "The Woods". Carey's Auto-Tuned vocals don't serve the emotional gut-punch that Vernon's do, but his monotone delivery on the tracks "Inspir" and "Avalanche" show that stirring catharsis isn't exactly his aim. Instead, Hoyas expresses a fascination with the relationships between the synthetic and organic, between distance and intimacy, and between folk tradition and digital vocabulary. But the steely elegy of "Inspir" shows that across all of these divides, Carey's not interested in taking sides, instead mapping the terrain where they all converge.
That Carey's day job is playing in such an acclaimed, frequently be-memed band as Bon Iver is, of course, a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it will prove difficult for him to shed the "guy from Justin Vernon's backing band" tag should he ever choose to do something radically different, but for now, because Carey's music never strays far from that familiar neck of the woods, it means he's got a built-in fanbase. Carey might be a lackluster frontman, but he's an expert vibesman-- and maybe Vernon's infamous squirminess to his own acclaim has shown Carey that it's not a terrible position to be in; it's probably no great disappointment to Carey that he's unlikely to earn any solo Grammys or spawn any joke Tumblrs any time soon. Hoyas is at its best when it sounds like Carey's disappearing.
