the o.c

Bon Iver, “Woods” (Blood Bank, 2009)

Imogen Heap, “Hide and Seek” (Speak For Yourself, 2003)

Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon is the very model of a modern Indie Mountain Man. If you’ve read any press about Bon Iver at all, you know the backstory behind last year’s For Emma, Forever Ago, wherein Vernon fled the wreckage of a broken band and a dissolved relationship and decided to cut people out of his life altogether for a while. Over three months in his father’s hunting cabin in Vermont, he wiled away the hours recording his own warbly falsetto over and over and stacking the copies on top of each other, emerging with one of the most talked-about albums of 2008. That’s great press, but it certainly raises expectations; what do you do when it’s time for a sophomore effort and you’ve got no backstory? Will people still like your music when, God forbid, you record it in a studio?

There’s no second album yet, so the jury’s still out. However, we do have January’s Blood Bank EP, which isn’t spectacular, but is a good sign Vernon (a) still has some fight in him, and (b) can be weird even in a studio setting. On the closing track, “Woods,” he employs that very quintessence of studio effects, auto-tune (I guess those weird “Be Kanye” posters from last year had an effect after all). But unlike ‘Ye, T-Pain, Cher, or any of pop music’s other resident robots, Vernon sounds as fragile as ever with the effect on. As before, he layers vocal tracks into a thick sound sandwich, only his timing and intonation are obviously off the mark, to a twitchy, spasmodic effect. “Woods” may not be the kind of thing you want to listen to more than twice, but props for turning the tables on everyone’s favorite new fad.

For contrast, I’m including the key track from Imogen Heap’s Speak for Yourself, a song I adore despite its association with The O.C. and, well, Imogen Heap. There’s no “right” way to use auto-tune, but if there were, this would probably be it.

UPDATE — Seems I spoke too soon about Heap; this insight came courtesy of my buddy Casey Holford:

“Hey man, just wanted to say, i’m not 100 percent sure about this, but I don’t think the vocal effects you hear on “Hide and Seek” were created with the program autotune. Actually I believe it’s layers of vocoder primarily, which is basically vocals processed through a synthesizer where notes are played to create pitch inside the articulation of an existing voice- this explains the chordal effect you hear there and the very keyboard-centric way that the notes move. I don’t know exactly how she does this stuff but I do know she can approximate a solo performance of this song live, I believe there is tape of it somewhere.”

Thanks for keeping me in line, Casey. Let this be a lesson to all of you not to let smarty-pants bloggers tell you what to think.

Download Blood Bank: Amazon MP3
Download Speak for Yourself: Amazon MP3