The first thing you may want to know about the mystery band Jason Feathers is that it features Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver. The second is that their album, De Oro, is a hybrid of swamp-rock and rap that trades on myths of the southern United States as a sinister place where laws are flexible, morals are optional and pleasure is central. Think Spring Breakers, the Musical—a fever dream you might enjoy being part of, provided someone figures out how to remove your conscience first.
The third thing is almost a foregone conclusion, and best stated as a question: Why? Vernon is a powerful musician who could command his fans to pay attention to any number of interesting projects, and in certain cases, has: Volcano Choir, the stonery soft-rock pastiche of Gayngs, and so on. De Oro, though—a collaboration with Gayngs’ Ryan Olson, Bon Iver drummer S. Carey, and the Minneapolis rapper Astronautalis—has the petulant air of music that knows it will be heard based on the people playing it, complete with the attempt to obscure who those people are, but not so well that it can’t be easily figured out. Behold a vaguely condescending backstory casting De Oro as an “after-bar-impromptu-musical-round-up” held “[j]ust outside Flori-bama” between a “red-chested god-bassed Southern rapper in a fancy white suit” and his “flashily-clad cronies.” All we’re missing is someone eating grits in a Cutlass up on blocks.
Of course, the history of pop music is filled with alter egos, stage personas, and people generally pretending to be someone other than who they are. But when you start landing what sound like punch lines about the Golden Corral buffet line, one wonders if you’re wrestling with the realities of someone’s identity or just making fun of it. So feel free to shudder with mild disgust as an Auto-Tuned Vernon bellows, “I am young as fuck, I am young as fuck, I am young as fuuuuuuuuck” or, worse, “God damn, we in the southland now!” because they’re dumb lines no matter who sings them but especially insulting in context, like a pimp-and-ho party held in the yard of a white frathouse. The humor lies entirely in the circular logic that they're jokes to begin with.
De Oro’s most interesting moments are its quietest ones. See “Sacred Math”, a nightmarish piece of ambience wherein Astronautalis—or his alter ego Creflo, pick your poison—strings together a series of vignettes about spring break, each one more hollow than the last. “Spring Break ’89/ We were choppin’ crab legs into lines/ The Old Bay did burn and we bled out our eyes but we agree it was a really great time,” he whispers, the last line repeated in some effort to convince himself that it’s true. Here, De Oro really is in step with Harmony Korine—and not the glitz of Spring Breakers but the muted depravity of Gummo, whose scenes of small-town life seemed calibrated to make you feel fascinated and disgusted at the same time.
As the hot licks pile up, I keep thinking of Das Racist, who managed to dismantle clichés about rap by embracing them, or about Vernon and Olson’s own work with Gayngs, which recreated soft-rock with a reverence just skewed enough to open up soft-rock as a concept—its parameters, its rules, what made it tick—without just devolving into cracks about boats and cocaine. Here we have a few well-connected guys hacking around and occasionally playing hickface, occasionally with great empathy but more often just for the fun of it, which is I suppose just another way to say "America."
