The Eau Claire Sound (And Smell)

Being highlighted this week by the good folks at the most aptly named music magazine in the world, "No Depression," is Eau Claire, Wisconsin's Bon Iver, who appeared recently on David Letterman:



Writes Andy Moore:

"Skinny Love" is a gothic campfire lament that features [Justin] Vernon's wood chop-strength steel guitar strumming. The song's intensity is fueled by Vernon's bandmates, all three of whom played drums on this selection: one with sticks over his snare, the other two pounding mallets prehistorically on individual floor toms, using both the head and rims of their drums to cast emotions into the thrall of Vernon's vocal pleas.

Vernon's falsetto is anything but pretentious. On the contrary, it's as though he found this high voice under a Dunn County fieldstone and took it home to tinker with it. He's an expressionist, and the tension in his metallic and pure voice comes from a place we've forgotten, or try to avoid....

[F]or all the band's astral trajectories, Bon Iver is rooted deep into northwestern Wisconsin soil. If patchouli is the smell of a Government Mule audience, Skoal is the smell of a Bon Iver crowd.