411mania.com: Music - Dancing About Architecture 9.15.09

Deerhunter played Whelan's last night. I suppose, if yours was a generally systemic view of history, you'd say that this is because Deerhunter always play in Ireland.

If one were so inclined to make it a similar charge could be made against Justin Vernon. The past 16 months has seen Vernon come to Ireland 4 times as/as part of Bon Iver, 3 times in Dublin last year and most recently it was back to his old stomping grounds in Galway where he used to work selling mobile phones.

One thing that you could say about Deerhunter in their defence is that despite their comparatively short lifespan as a band they've already amassed a pretty sizable catalog to pick and choose their setlists from. Vernon on the other hand doesn't have that many songs in his Bon Iver repertoire, there's 9 tracks on For Emma, Forever Ago one of which is more of an extended outro to "Creature Fear", another song that's exclusive to the iTunes version of the record, the wonderful "Bracket, WI" from this year's Dark Was The Night comp. and the 4 cuts from the Blood Bank EP. Throw in in the occasional Talk Talk cover and you've essentially got the same set being peddled over and over. Some nights it's great, some nights it's not.

It's not something that I think you should hold against Vernon, maybe he's just one of those guys who doesn't crank out the tunes in a rapid fire manner, and generally his hit rate once he actually comes up with a song is pretty good.

But possibly another reason for there being not a whole of Bon Iver material is that Vernon's attention has been focused in part on finishing the first album by Volcano Choir, his collaboration with members of Collections Of Colonies Of Bees, though considering that he's been working on this project for a couple of years now maybe it just backs up the idea that he doesn't work that quickly.

In listening to Unmap there's definitely echoes of Bon Iver in it, most notably on "Still", which is basically "Woods" from the Blood Bank EP, but thanks to the addition of droning synths, rattling steel guitar strings and occasional drums it's no longer an unpleasant to listen to mess of acapella vocoder altered singing. Those multi voiced arrangements, such a hallmark of For Emma ... are also prominent on this album but that's basically where the similarities end. Mostly Unmap is a more experimental sounding record, acoustic guitar based songs have been replaced by ambient washes, repeating loops, and beeps and drum strikes which bounce around the mix due to clever use of tremolo and panning.

Mostly too, it's not as good as the last record that Vernon put out. But it is a damn sight better than Hazeltons the pretty much straight acoustic folk record that he released in highly limited numbers prior to that under his own name. I think perhaps he's found what he does best in the tricky to pull off blending of traditional song writing with his more experimental impulses and if and when he returns to that that's the next record from him to potentially get excited about.