It was always going to be difficult since the enormous success of Bon Iver for Volcano Choir to be anything more than ‘Bon Iver dude’s other band’. However, with Repave Volcano Choir have pulled off the impossible and released an album with a distinct identity that transcends the aforementioned categorisation.
Opening song Tiderways, ostensibly, bares the resemblance of a funeral march, a march towards relative in-glory. However, it is actually a paean to unity and collective creativity. Building off Justin Vernon’s signature falsetto, the song takes shape off mathematical drumming, sparkling keys and surprisingly heavy guitar lines. Prophetically Vernon entreats listeners to “brace for the tiderways,” that indecently makes way for the next song Acetate, the most exciting and defining song of the record.
Acetate is sparse and dense, tom-drums form the back bone of this track along with an intelligent bass rhythm, meanwhile Vernon and the rest of the ‘choir’s’ voices rise and fall, almost as though the creativity of the right-side of the brain is battling with the order and discipline of the left. The discipline on this song comes courtesy of the band’s drummer Jon Mueller, a widely respected US drummer, composer and percussionist who formed Volcano Choir as a collaboration between Vernon and the band Collections Of Collections Of Bees.
While Volcano Choir’s sound lends itself to introspection and mourning – as with Bon Iver – the third song Comrade is actually an interesting piece of music with a hilarious punchline: for the final refrain of the song Vernon’s voice is auto-tuned, you know like Pitbull of any one of the other number of by-the-numbers RnB artists. It’s very funny to hear this in a style of music accompanying music that is essentially nouveau-Americana.
The aforementioned Acetate is the first phase in a triptych of songs placed at the beginning (Acetate), middle (Alaskans) and ending (Almanac). Alaskans is as vast and spacious as the tundra in that its namesake reside, the vocals and the backing of a piano mirroring a softly picked guitar are so relaxed it is almost slack, but in line with the overall mode of this record, it works – everything works.
BY DAN WATT
Best Track: Acetate
If You Like These, You’ll Like This: Bon Iver BON IVER, Fellow Travellers SHEARWATER, The Silver Gymnasium OKKERVIL RIVER
In A Word: Touching
