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Bury the Square

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  • Table of the Elements

Bon Iver's Justin Vernon left the North Carolina band DeYarmond Edison and the remaining members went on to form Megafaun; here on their debut album, they are a band of extremes, mixing Dock Boggs-style Appalachian twang with harsh noise salvos.

Oil and water don't mix, but in the brief moment when the oil plunges through the surface of the water, they appear to. The North Carolina-based band DeYarmond Edison managed to sustain this fleeting moment for about four years. Like Richard Buckner, they reconciled flickering folk-rock and ambient drones in an organic, subdued way. But natural law inevitably prevailed, and as Edison wound down, they split into two different acts: Singer/songwriter Justin Vernon became Bon Iver, whose watery meanderings represent Edison's poppier side. Joe Westerlund and brothers Phil and Brad Cook (the latter of whom runs Burly Time records with Pitchfork contributor Grayson Currin) reconvened as Megafaun, whose viscous avant-folk pushes both their experimental and archaic leanings further than ever before.

With Vernon out of the picture, it's as if the center of their former group's aesthetic dropped out, leaving only the extremes. On one hand, Megafaun trafficks in Appalachian twang more indebted to Dock Boggs than DeYarmond Edison's prominent Jay Farrar influence. There was something gentrified about Edison, but not so with Megafaun-- there is hooting, hollering; there are banjos scratching and pecking in the dirt. The blowzy barbershop harmonies that open "Find Your Mark" evoke Fleet Foxes with terrible hangovers, although this album's release on a sub-label of the experimental music imprint Table of the Elements should give you a clue that this is more than rustic reconstruction. Megafaun do away with Edison's polite experimentation in favor of full-bore concrète music, harsh noise salvos, and wild free-jazz interventions (Westerlund was a pupil of Milford Graves). It's remarkable that the hybrid sounds as seamless as Edison's staid-by-comparison one.

Bury the Square abounds with surprises that don't feel forced. "Find Your Mark" is a perfect example: The aforementioned barbershop harmonies, backed by extremely loose percussion, give way to tight and sprightly ba-bums that wouldn't sound out of place on a Sufjan Stevens album. Then some brief tape manipulations and the emergence of electric guitar tilt the song into a final movement that ties it all together. The eleven-minute "Where We Belong" is dominated by aching vocals and gentle banjo; the screeching noise section would seem to come out of nowhere if it weren't latent in the flittering subterranean rhythms beneath the calm surface of the song proper. The more traditionally inclined tracks "His Robe", "Drains", and "Lazy Suicide" prove that Megafaun don't necessarily need left-field embellishments, they just like them. But they're at their most compelling and original when they use them: "Tired and Troubled", which sinks the traces of a simple folk song into a chaotic labyrinth of field recordings, draws a direct and astute line between two idioms that are superficially at odds, but meet on the common ground of an appreciation for spontaneity and a reverence for the mutations of chance.

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