Bon Iver
(Jagjaguwar)
The charms of Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago are well-known at this point, as is the too-good-to-not-be-true mythology that grew up around it. Justin Vernon did, indeed, retreat to a cabin in northern Wisconsin to nurse a broken heart, and the music flowed like sap from a maple tree-slow, steady, sure, and sweet. The album landed on too many 2008 best-of lists to count, and deservedly so.
The tracks on the Blood Bank EP are both of a piece with the meditative, haunting songs on For Emma and welcome proof that Vernon isn't trapped in the soundscape he so beautifully staked out. "Blood Bank" is more rhythmically driving than anything he's recorded (though a far cry from the crashing live version he's been performing), while "Babys" begins with a pulsing , minimalist piano line a la Philip Glass that builds and swirls to a lovely crescendo.
The real surprise, though, is "Woods," on which Vernon runs his a cappella vocals through a vocoder. Vernon's not the first artist outside the mainstream to employ the device so popularly used by T. Pain and Kanye West-Imogen Heap and Bob Mould have both used it with mixed results-but in his hands, and with his voice, it sounds neither gimmicky nor forced. It's jarring at first, but in the end, as the multi-tracked vocals multiply and swell, it seems a perfectly logical and absolutely beautiful extension of his already powerful instrument.
At only four songs, Blood Bank feels too short, but it's a fitting coda to Bon Iver's debut and an enticing prologue to the next full-length album.
Standout Tracks: "Blood Bank," "Woods" ERIC SCHUMACHER-RASMUSSEN
