James Blake and Justin Vernon met at SXSW earlier this year and recorded this song over email as Fall Creek Boys Choir. It’s got dog woof noises and sounds just like you’d expect a collab between these two in 2011 would sound. Autotune and sparse production. It’ll be available from iTunes on August 29th.
Niall Byrne is the founder of the most-influential Irish music site Nialler9, where he has been writing about music since 2005. He is the co-host of the Nialler9 Podcast and has written for the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Sunday Times, Totally Dublin, Cara Magazine, Red Bull and more. Niall is a DJ, co-founder of Lumo Club, event curator, Indie Sleaze club promoter, and producer of gigs and monthly listening parties & events in Dublin.
I am not a fan of this. Love pretty much anything Bon Iver has released and even some Justin Vernon collabs like Big Red Machine with Aaron Dessner. This track just feels a bit too loose, a bit too eratic. It sounds like it’s a mix where they tried out a bunch of ideas through out the recording process and then just unmuted them all and bounced that out as the final mix. I’m a bit disappointed considering how much I liked the new album but I haven’t listened to any of Blakes music before so it could be partly to do with his style.
It’s pretty much a Blake production with Bon Iver on it which explains why you don’t like it so!
Is this a joke? Autotuning can be used effectively (Nico Jaar’s Colomb is imo a good example) but here it has reached the level of parody. The less said about those pointless woof noises the better.