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Volcano Choir: "Comrade" Posted: 15 Aug 2013 09:16 AM PDT Photo by Cameron Wittig Whether he was tossing back some brewskis with the Shouting Matches, in it during the Yeezus sessions, trading notes with Alicia Keys, or working with Kathleen Edwards, Justin Vernon has worked very hard to prove he's having too much fun with his friends to work on a third Bon Iver album, and the new Volcano Choir album, Repave (out out September 3 in the U.S. and September 2 internationally via Jagjaguwar), drives that point home. 2009's Unmap was a repository for the most stoned musical ideas of Vernon and his collaborators from Collections of Colonies of Bees. "Comrade", the second single from Repave, isn't just a callback to Bon Iver's exploratory, ornately orchestrated hymns-- it's an accidental and logical extension of them. "Skinny Love" abetted many a small screen drama, "Beth/Rest" was an unearthed soundtrack to a cinematic first kiss in 1987, and "Comrade" gets crystal clear and modern, widescreen and HD, using verdant, arena-ready power balladry as a jumping off point rather than a logical extreme. You can still call it "post-rock", as CoCoB weave together offbeat guitar frills and piano lines into a perfectly aligned latticework, while Vernon susses out stray lines in a lower register. The chorus, though, that's rock, a torrent of drum rolls, frantic ivories and Vernon leaping to a falsetto, carried upward by a surge of reverb.