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.