Album Of The Week: Volcano Choir Repave

This wasn't supposed to happen. Volcano Choir wasn't supposed to become a real band who make great albums. By this point, I'd come to understand Justin Vernon as the type of great artist who only gets around to making great art after he's already exhausted every form of procrastination he can find. Four years separated For Emma, Forever Ago and Bon Iver, Bon Iver, and it felt like longer, since Vernon never went away. When he's not busy with his main band, he stays out there, indulging musical whim after musical whim and cluttering up his discography. Vernon did the blooz-band record, the record with the Minneapolis prom-soul collective, the unlikely Kanye hooks, the production gigs, the guest appearances, the reunions with old bandmates, the one-offs, the constant neverending tours. And a lot of that stuff is good. The Gayngs album is great, he always sounds amazing on Kanye tracks, and I once saw him sing an absolutely shattering rendition of Donny Hathaway's "You've Got A Friend" with his reunited old band DeYarmond Edison. But there'd been an understanding that none of this stuff would add up to the general glacial beauty that he'd conjure whenever he got it together to make a new Bon Iver album -- that it would take time and mental energy for him to conjure this glacial beauty in the first place. The first Volcano Choir album, 2009's Unmap, seemed like a side project, much like all the other side projects: One truly gorgeous song in "Islands, IS" and then a whole lot of formless pretty-enough ambiance. But now we get Repave. And Repave is something else.