Justin Vernon and his able mates set sail, under a strong wind, on what could prove to be an epic musical odyssey... Though he may indeed be “winding it down” (as he put it a year ago) in terms of Bon Iver, Justin Vernon’s sonic and spiritual adventures are ongoing under another nameplate. The tellingly titled Repave, the second collaboration between Vernon and Collections Of Colonies Of Bees, doesn’t appear to be merely another diversion in Vernon’s ever-unfolding narrative, which, since the release of 2011’s Bon Iver, has encompassed key roles on album projects with Megafaun, Kathleen Edwards, Colin Stetson and Shouting Matches, as well as guest appearances with Kanye West and POS. No, this record has all the earmarks of Vernon’s next big thing. Unlike Volcano Choir's test run, 2009’s Unmap, the new follow-up is a proper album – and a bona fide rock album at that. “I felt like I was in a rock band almost for the first time”, Vernon says in Dan Hunting’s mini-documentary on the making of the LP. COCOC, comprising Volcano Choir’s other members – drummer/percussionist Jon Mueller, guitarists Chris Rosenau and Dan Spack, keyboard player Tom Wincek and bassist Matthew Skemp – is, of course, hardly a standard rock band, with an extensive discog of envelope-pushing experimental music. This project is a different exercise for both parties – the result of a back-and-forth between instrumental pieces made by Rosenau, Wincek and other bandmembers, which Vernon then manipulated (as he’s shown, he’s a masterful manipulator), with Mueller’s percussion and Vernon’s vocals as the final ingredients. The first sound we hear is an oversized liturgical organ, out of which float those familiar stacked falsetto harmonies, but here, on “Tideways”, the groove throbbing beneath the airborne voices is wilder and more aggressive than we’ve come to expect from Vernon, more four-square than previous COCOC efforts. On the following “Acetate”, he introduces his lower register amid tribal drums, Gregorian chanting and twinkling piano notes in
a syncopated yet regal arrangement, with a twist of Motown in the climax. He stays with his natural voice, an earthy baritone, in the intro to “Comrade”, then slides upward, as the track churns along in symphonic splendour. At mid-song, the arrangement enlarges into all-out majesty as Vernon conjoins his low end and falsetto into an eerie hybrid, which in turn gives way to the rumble of an Auto-Tune-created humanoid, as the surrounding sounds wither away. “Byegone”, the first single, is lush from the get-go, a lilting plucked acoustic setting the mood before it’s surrounded by the massed ensemble, the whole of it sounding like a pastoral Windham Hill piece enlarged to arena-rock scale. Vernon nestles into the plush aural tapestry with the most natural-sounding vocal he’s ever recorded; doubled in the classic Lennon style, it’s grand and intimate at once. On “Alaskans”, we enter calm waters after the preceding series of crashing waves, but there’s something unsettling here, too, as Vernon’s vocal morphs from a sort of Gordon Lightfoot-like burnished folksiness to an ominous, all but demonic growl. 
The groove comes to the fore on the playfully titled “Dancepack”, but it’s implied before Mueller begins to pound it out. Vernon’s vocal is playful, theatrical, Bruce-like, as he powers into the incantatory refrain, “Take note, there’s still a hole in your heart”, while an electric guitar flirts with dissonance, forming lemon-tangy chords. “Keel” begins in suspended animation, with Vernon’s falsetto gliding over an implied expanse of woodland, as muted instrumental sounds weave a beckoning still life below him. The sustained sonic foreplay is released with “Almanac”, a titanic, shape-shifting universe of thunder-crack percussion and soulful vocal signifying that opens into a celestial chorale of burbling, over-lapping voices. There’s a revelatory moment in mid-song, as Vernon sings “ALL NIGHT/It’s on, RIGHT/SO FRESH that it sizzles”, as if marveling at the open-ended beauty they’re creating as it’s happening, 
and imagining where these art/soul brothers can take it from here. There’s little doubt at this point that Vernon’s overarching ambition is matched by his limitless inventiveness, and now, that of his co-conspirators. On this monumental outing, as he’s noted, he’s fronting a real rock band. My guess: there’s no turning back now. Bud Scoppa Q+A Justin Vernon, Chris Rosenau Is your commitment to Volcano Choir as deep as Repave suggests? Rosenau: Right now, we’re in the moment. We’re trying to figure out how to play this stuff live and make it gigantic. At some point, someone’s gonna get a bug up their ass and write another Volcano Choir song. There won’t be a timeline, but it’s too much fun not to play with these guys. Vernon: I’m getting a Volcano Choir tattoo next week! No, it’s been central to me. It’s been a way to take all of the confusion of the other things I’ve been doing on my own. It’s been shaping more than anything I’ve done; emotionally and [in terms of] reflection and reacting. I don’t think I’ve ever sung like this before. It was challenging, but it revealed itself to me, and it was because of these guys. It’s here to stay. Where did the band name come from? Rosenau: Vernon had been sending me choral stuff under the name Fall Creek Boys Choir, and that “choir” thing stuck with me. And even on Unmap, there were moments that were a portent of how huge this could be musically. John came up with Volcano Choir, and it instantly resonated. Vernon: It also has a lot to do with marijuana!  INTERVIEW: BUD SCOPPA

How much of a good thing is too much..? “It’s too late to stop now,” sang Van Morrison on Moondance in 1970, and he was right: here we are again in its aura, drawn back like wanderers to the light of an inn. Recorded when he and his wife Janet (pregnant with their daughter, Shana) lived in the mountains near Woodstock, Moondance was the third LP in a solo career that stretches to this day. Morrison had already made his first masterpiece, Astral Weeks, and was assiduously cultivating his five-decade grudge against those he deemed the enemies of his music. It was far too late to stop. Astral Weeks and Moondance are profoundly different works, apparently unconnected by theme or progression. If you didn’t know, you might suppose Moondance was created first, since Astral Weeks is the more Joycean, the one with bigger ideas, while the 10 songs on Moondance have conventional structures and fall into recognisable genres (soul, country, jazz). But as this 60-track, 4CD/1 Blu-Ray boxset reveals, Morrison was aiming for something quite ambitious on Moondance: a combination of understated music and consummate ‘feel’, which would be locked down and given modest embellishment (flute, harpsichord), leaving the framework just flexible enough to allow the musicians to produce little moments of magic. Moondance transports and elevates. Atmospherically fluid (it starts with pouring rain but the sun soon shines), it turns a boyhood swim into a transcendental episode (“And It Stoned Me”), finds impossible romance in the life of a gypsy (“Caravan”) and uses its own vocabulary (“fantabulous”, “magnificently”) to raise a homespun insight or a pleasant evening to the stature of an epiphany. Even the unwelcome businessmen shaking hands and talking in numbers (“Glad Tidings”) can’t spoil the wild beauty of Morrison’s landscapes. Moondance has always been huge in his body of work. Years of demand for remasters of Moondance and Astral Weeks were answered in 2008 with Japanese CDs that can still be found on Amazon. The lure of this Deluxe Edition is not so much sound quality (you may feel the remastering is too intense and bass-y) but access to the Moondance vaults. So, for example, the second disc (‘The Sessions’) has eight takes of “Caravan” – three of which break down almost immediately – and the third disc (‘More Sessions’) has eight takes of “Into The Mystic” and seven of “Brand New Day”. Far from being fragments or sketches, most of these are complete performances with vocals. The problem is that Morrison worked painstakingly with acoustic guitar, bass and drums for six or seven takes at a time, making only minor adjustments as he went. Don’t expect stunning new arrangements every time. “Into The Mystic”, as it happens, is an elegant piece that can withstand being heard a number of times in a row. The heart leaps each time it begins, and some takes are so fine that it’s not easy to hear the faults that Morrison detected in them. Whatever he was after, it was obviously something subtle. Finally, piano, horns and electric guitar are added on Take 17, by which time the song is almost home. But seven takes in the company of “Brand New Day” are not nearly as thrilling. Its arrangement is dependent on a piano and gospel vocal trio and it sounds barren without them. By Take 4, a five-minute instrumental, facetiousness set in and I started lustily singing “A Whiter Shade Of Pale” over the chords. “Glad Tidings” is more interesting because they can’t decide on a tempo and the song vacillates between a lively, “Brown Eyed Girl”-style canter and a more ballad-like tempo that’s all wrong for the lyrics’ optimistic message. By Take 7 they’re getting into minute specifics (“Van – one hair slower”, suggests someone over the intercom) but are no closer to finding the solution. The fourth disc (‘Sessions, Alternates & Mixes’) puts “Come Running” and “Moondance” under the microscope (six and two takes, respectively), with a few takes where one of the musicians sings a prominent high harmony on “Come Running”. It could be seen as a foretaste of the interplay that Morrison would later adopt with Brian Kennedy, but the idea was scrapped for the LP version. Some songs from the Moondance sessions didn’t make it onto the album. “I’ve Been Working” was given a total rethink and held over for the follow-up, His Band And The Street Choir. On the takes here, it’s a funky vamp like The Bar-Kays with Morrison improvising lyrics about Jesse James and Lord Tennyson. But 11 mins (Take 1) and 10 mins (Take 5) are a long time to sit through a jam that’s clearly not suitable for Moondance. “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out” doesn’t get far either. In the hesitant run-through we hear, only Van and the pianist sound confident of the song’s changes. The much-bootlegged “I Shall Sing”, meanwhile, is a catchy tune with a buoyant calypso flavour in the horn part. We quickly become very familiar with this horn part, because “I Shall Sing” extends to 13 maddening takes. The song falters; they start again. Van stops it; it resumes. There’s a mistake; the mistake is corrected. Precisely 15 minutes elapse before our stoicism cracks and we turn into John Cleese shouting at the bouzouki players in the Cheese Shop sketch. No wonder it was left off the album. Morrison must have been sick of hearing it. Perennially disgruntled that Warner Bros, and not he, owns the masters of Moondance, Morrison has condemned the Deluxe Edition as “unauthorised” and akin to the theft of his music. It might have been better to leave it alone. Yes, it’s fascinating at times to be a witness to the meticulous construction of great music, but the contents of this boxset feel a mite desperate, rather than generous, and the flabbiness of its 11-minute jams is entirely inappropriate for an album that famously doesn’t contain an ounce of fat. The 2CD Expanded Edition, featuring 11 tracks from the Deluxe, would be a less expensive option for the non-obsessive Moondance fan. David Cavanagh

Will Sheff goes back to the future... Terrible things happened in the 1980s. People rolled up the jackets of their suit sleeves. There were keyboards worn like guitars, and guitars with no heads. It was widely believed acceptable behaviour to play the bass with one’s thumb. Every drum sound echoed like a thunderclap, everything else was drenched in turgid washes of synthesiser. Dave Stewart was paid money to produce things. Of the hair, we shall not speak. Yet this much-mocked decade was – especially when regarded from a distance of thirty years’ steady diminishment of rock’n’roll and fracturing of popular culture – incredibly exciting. MTV, the beginning of the media saturation which would eventually eat music alive from within, was in its early stages an invigorating agent making even the furthest-flung of settlements feel part of what was going on. Among these hamlets was Meriden, New Hampshire, home to fewer than 500 souls, one of whom was Will Sheff. The Silver Gymnasium, Okkervil River’s seventh studio album, finds Sheff revving up whatever a 21st century mad professor might use instead of a DeLorean, and returning whence he came. The Silver Gymnasium is, then, a concept album. But it is emphatically not a period piece. Though produced by John Agnello – once an accessory to assorted abominations by Cyndi Lauper, The Hooters, John Cougar Mellencamp and Twisted Sister, among others – “The Silver Gymnasium” conforms mostly to Okkervil River’s established template of anxious, wordy New Wave power pop (though this was, of course, a staple genre of the MTV era in the first place). The musical gestures to the period in which “The Silver Gymnasium” is set are few, and unshowy. Were one not equipped with foreknowledge of what Sheff was doing here, the big tinkling Cheap Trick keyboard riff on “Down Down The Deep River”, the shuffling Mr Mister white-boy funk of “Stay Young” would appear so seamless as to be unremarkable. The Silver Gymnasium, is no exercise in whimsical nostalgia. The opening track, “It Was My Season”, conceals beneath its jaunty Gilbert O’Sullivan-ish piano, and references to VCRs and Ataris, blurred recollections of teenage anguish which seem to surprise Sheff with its lingering potence, as memories of this febrile period in any person’s life can (“This pain inside’s still just too sharp/What was I thinking?”). There are recurring memories of assorted car crashes, some accidental, some apparently deliberate (“Lido Pier Suicide Car”). There are what appear laments to compadres who didn’t make it out of Meriden, and/or adolescence (“Walking Without Frankie”). There are also, more happily, any number of reminders of Sheff’s treasurable idiosyncrasies as a writer, of the fact that he is one of very few whose voice is recognisable in just a couple of lines of any given lyric sheet. The baleful yet irresistible singalong “All The Time Every Day” is structured as a Q&A dialogue, the chorused title replying to such posers as “Do you watch the world get cold, and crushed and small? And when you could do so much, do you do fuck all?” This last reproach is as crucial to The Silver Gymnasium, as it is to all examinations of youth as reviewed from middle age (though Sheff is not yet 40, his precocity advances him a decade or so). If we knew then what we know now, we’d be richer, happier and/or would at least have gotten laid a lot more. Conversely, if only we could unlearn some of what we have picked up since then, we’d be braver, kinder, more passionate. Or, as Sheff puts it on “Stay Young”, “Don’t get tough. Don’t ‘get on with it’. Stay on. It’s so heartbreaking and it’s so sad when it’s gone.” The Silver Gymnasium, is the archest conceit Okkervil River have yet attempted – a considerable accolade for this group in particular. But it is also the sincerest, most heartfelt album they’ve yet assembled, and it’s all the more powerful for it. Andrew Mueller Q&A WILL SHEFF Why Meriden, New Hampshire, and why 1986? I love it when art feels local. It’s done in films all the time, but rarely in rock music. And I think New England is misrepresented in art, as a sanitizsed land of picket fences where everyone talks like a Kennedy, and under-represented in songwriting. The 1980s adolescence seems to have been more so than most. Was there something special about being young at that time? I actually think it was kind of a terrible, tragic time. Especially in the second half. Something horrible happened to culture. People think of 80s music as silly, but when you look at stuff like ‘Scary Monsters’, ‘Remain In Light’, ‘Cupid & Psyche ’85’, you see the real promise of the 80s. Then it all crumbled and by the end it was all mullets and DX7s and gated drums and horror. Was making a concept album kind of an act of rebellion against the way that music has now become so fragmented, so instant? Yeah. I realised that for better or for worse I compose songs with a lot of love and care, and try to make whole integrated artworks that at least in my dreams will last for a little while. I think I kind of came home to that idea and just thought I was going to make something that felt defiantly substantial. How important was it to choose a producer associated with the 80s? I don’t want to take the listener to 1986 sonically. I want to take them there emotionally. We didn’t stress about period details in the sound. It was more about paying tribute to the spirit of that time, both the carefree and vulnerable aspects of childhood and what a child absorbed from the easy-breezy vibe of rock radio. I wanted a producer who was actually there, but more importantly I wanted a producer who was a real producer. INTERVIEW: ANDREW MUELLER