There's a moment in "The Wolves (Act I and II)", a song on Justin Vernon's debut album as Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago, where you first suspect that there's more going on with this dude than meets the eye. Up until that point, the record is, as advertised, ascetic and stripped down, the product of a person alone in a cabin for months with only a guitar for company. The songs early on bring to mind snow, wood, creaky furniture, drawn breaths-- organic materials that could have been just as easily assembled 80 years ago. But as Vernon sings the "what might have been lost" refrain in "Wolves", you hear something strange creeping in: One of the many voices, which are layered and harmonized, both full and falsetto, is run through some kind of vocoder-like effect. It's subtle at first, added without drawing much attention to itself, but it even so it feels like the floor dropping out. Just like that, the song is broken wide open, and Vernon's music is infused with a sense of unexpected possibility.
That boundless feeling was confirmed on Bon Iver's Blood Bank EP, released at the beginning of this year. One if its songs, "Woods", was an a cappella number with every voice processed, as Vernon stretched and trilled the phrases like Crosby, Stills, Nash, and T-Pain. Yes, these effects became absurdly ubiquitous last year, and the mere fact that it was used was nothing special. But Vernon is operating in a milieu-- an emotionally driven singer-songwriter on a noted indie rock label-- where people don't usually do such things. Especially so early in a promising career, where you're not sure how your audience might react. My sense is that Vernon was able to put expectations aside; he had a sound in mind and he went for it, without worrying too much about what a "Bon Iver" song should be. And that in itself was exciting.
So after Emma's deserved success, the nifty stopgap EP, and Vernon's long stretch on the road winning new fans, his next move proves to be yet another welcome curveball: teaming with the post-rock outfit Collections of Colonies of Bees for a short album of experimental pop as Volcano Choir. Vernon's voice is one of the most distinctive going right now, so you can always hear him in this music. But at the same time, Unmap in no way feels like any sort of follow-up to Emma. This is partly because these tracks aren't really songs. Words mean very little, and there's not much in the way of verses or choruses. Instead, Vernon's voice becomes a texture, a tool for shading the tracks and bringing them into focus. Collections of Colonies of Bees, who have over the last couple of records proven to be the rare instrumental rock band with ideas about how to keep things both surprising and musical, bring Vernon into their world, which turns out to be a very good thing.
When it all comes together, the results are dazzling. "Seeplymouth" is one highlight. With its repeating guitar chimes and chanted voices, it begins with a loose, jazzy feel weirdly reminiscent of Peanuts composer Vince Guaraldi. But then, after a sung passage by Vernon, it continues to build in intensity until it's a huge, pumping mass of crashing drums and wailed voices, something apocalyptic and almost unbearably intense. Equally impressive, and much closer to a conventional song, is the following "Island, IS", with its hyper-repetitive keyboard pulse drawn from modern classical, loping drums, and Vernon singing mesmerizingly opaque phrases that sound like the product of automatic writing.
Heard back-to-back, these two tracks suggest a sort of fusion between the U.S. and UK versions of post-rock. There's definitely some Talk Talk here, in the way assumptions about sound and structure are re-thought from the ground up and used in service of a new kind of song. But there's also a sense of Tortoise's studiousness, the way existing genres are toyed with and then broken down for parts. But despite the looseness and the grab-bag approach, the best of the songs on Unmap-- the airy opener "Husks and Shells", with its plucked acoustic and Vernon multi-tracked into reverb-heavy choir, and "Still", which is a longer, better version of the EP's "Woods" augmented by droning keyboards and Steve Reich-like figures-- feel right as rain, like these weird mash-ups were there all along, just waiting to be discovered.
Some of the tracks are unformed explorations that weren't pursued as far as they could have been, but even these have something to recommend. "Dote" puts Vernon in an echoing cavern and stretches his voice out to a rich, gothic drone that sounds like something Kranky would have loved to put out in the late 1990s. But it lasts only for three minutes and feels like it's just getting rolling when it crashes sharply into "And Gather". But then, fortunately, the latter is another short, intriguing track, bringing to mind Animal Collective's Sung Tongs with its acoustic guitar figure, handclaps, and chants. So where half-formed ideas are found, sharp editing keeps the album moving along. The only track that doesn't work is "Mbira in the Morass", which finds Vernon straining for a kind of bent soul vibe over a shapeless background heavy on the titular instrument. Still, one skip on such a truly experimental record-- they're really trying stuff here, not totally sure if it's going to work-- is an impressive feat. And for Vernon, the possibilities now seem even more vast.
