Live Review: Volcano Choir, 9:30 Club (9/12/13)

The sad reality about Volcano Choir shows are that a large amount of people are there to see Justin Vernon. The Bon Iver superstar's involvement in the project drove in plenty of fans solely due to name value, but Volcano Choir isn't a band that features a "frontman." It's a magical collective of similar minded and equally talented musicians, merging together to form wonderful music. In a live setting, this feeling of teamwork displays itself even more blatantly, creating a performance that could be appreciated by all for the musical brilliance coming from the stage.

Album Review: Volcano Choir - Repave

Album Rating: B+

As much as I want to believe that I know a lot about modern music, it seems like every other week a new band that I should have heard about years ago finds a way to pop up on my all-too limited radar that, somehow, has always completely overlooked it. I didn’t know about Grizzly Bear until two years ago, and January was the first time I ever heard of Local Natives, which is almost direct proof that I do, indeed, live in a dark, isolated cave in the middle of the rainforest. This week, my newest missed hype explosion is Wisconsin's Volcano Choir, who have been around since the mid-2000s, racked up significant critical acclaim, and have direct ties to Bon Iver, all completely without my knowing. Regardless of why or why not I haven’t heard of this widely known and respected act, though, I had the interesting privilege of experiencing the band’s newest release, Repave, with a blank slate. I had no preconceived notions of sound, no desire for an adherence to their old conventions, and the only whiff of context onto which I could feasibly latch was the fact that the band was probably pretty good since they’ve sold so many records with Justin Vernon at the helm—albeit, in secrecy to me. So I grabbed a chair and my headphones, set up outside on a beautiful day, and introduced myself to Volcano Choir to see what I’d been missing.

Jukebox: Volcano Choir - "Still"

When I did my artist of the day about Bon Iver, I looked at Blood Bank for the first time from a critical standpoint, and there were a few things that shocked me about it, like the auto-tune. However, upon a re-listen of "Woods," I've come to appreciate just how much artistic merit the song actually holds, how using auto-tune as an instrument to blend differently auto-tuned voices together was an incredibly new innovation to me. It was disconcerting at first, but now I look at it as a stroke of genius, and props to the band for having that kind of creativity and ingenuity.

And then I discovered Volcano Choir. A side-project of Justin Vernon's, the band releases similar works to the more group-oriented material of Bon Iver. Specifically, I'd found that "Woods" had been re-recorded on The Volcano Choir's Unmap as the song "Still" (seriously you probably already know this, but it's blowing my mind right now) and the differences are as wonderful as they are varied. While "Woods" has only the auto-tuned vox as instrumentation, "Still" utilizes vox in addition to clean, powerful guitars and layers of depth from synthesizers. The result is something incredibly close to post-rock, something I would never have associated Justin Vernon with in a million years - yet Volcano Choir proves me wrong, right in front of my face. Although it was up in the Billboard 200 back in October 2009, it's just really cool to see a tie with everyone's favorite indie band and my favorite genre of music.