Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 21/09/09
Label: Jagjaguwar

Though you might be able to just about summon up his name if pushed, earnest US folkie Justin Vernon never exactly got famous. What garnered worldwide notoriety in all actuality was the log cabin he frequented, the bitter isolation of its location in Wisconsin woodland and the heartache that haunted him during his infamous soul-searching midwinter retreat. His success as Bon Iver with the album "For Emma, Forever Ago" belongs as much to the mythology that grew up around it as anything else.

Which surely spelt all host of challenges for the man Justin and his acoustic guitar when they set about following up that album without all of those things. Bon Iver's "Blood Bank EP", from earlier this year, did offer some tentative hope, proffering dreamy moments both solidly hand-crafted and more liberally experimental over its four tracks, but nothing to match the delicate flight of the album.

By choosing the culmination of years of collaborative work with fellow Wisconsinites Collections Of Colonies Of Bees as his next full length release, under the name Volcano Choir, he has quite cleverly managed to not just diffuse the pressure bearing down on him but to simultaneously sustain his reputation also. That it is a beautifully realised set of textures and sounds certainly helps, as does the fact that its keenly abstract, exploratory bent makes any attempted comparisons with his debut album practically meaningless.

When "Island, IS" emerged as a taster for the record with its spasmodic beats and intoxicating firefly melodies, it sounded like TV On The Radio unplugged, or probably the kind of weightless transmogrifying melee Brian Eno wishes he could distil Coldplay into, and that stands as a good signpost to the overall atmosphere of "Unmap". Not that all is as palatable or infectious as that first single. The very brief (little more than 60 seconds) "Cool Knowledge", for instance, is the sound of a barbershop quartet being violated by a stick, slowly.

It's all much more Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective or Four Tet than Elliott Smith or Iron & Wine, particularly when considering pivotal tracks "Still" and "Seeplymouth"; layering up percussive strands until the point the songs collapse in on themselves, folding in fragments of distant conversations, electronic flourishes entering and exiting like flares in your peripheral vision and Vernon's now distinctive tones used for cohesion in amongst drifting amorphous vocal menageries. It may not have been borne out of an intimacy with a wilderness, but it instead creates its own which is in many ways just as fascinating.

    by James Berry