Repave
| Repave | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
_Album_Cover.jpg) |
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| Studio album by Volcano Choir | ||||
| Released | September 3, 2013 | |||
| Recorded | November 2010 - March 2013, Wisconsin | |||
| Genre | ||||
| Length | 39:01 | |||
| Label | Jagjaguwar | |||
| Producer | Volcano Choir | |||
| Volcano Choir chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Aggregate scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Metacritic | 77/100 |
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |    |
| Alternative Press | |
| The A.V. Club | A- |
| Consequence of Sound | |
| Exclaim! | 8/10 |
| musicOMH | |
| NME | 7/10 |
| Pitchfork | 7.8/10 |
| PopMatters |   |
| Rolling Stone | |
Repave is the second studio album by American indie rock band Volcano Choir, released on September 2, 2013 on Jagjaguwar. Recorded between November 2010 and March 2013, the album is self-produced by the band.
Released to critical acclaim, the album reached number forty-eight on the UK Albums Chart.
Volcano Choir began work on Repave in November 2010, choosing to record in the band's home state of Wisconsin. Recording would continue for almost two and a half years, with its eight songs changing throughout. Guitarist Chris Rosenau noted, "The kind of time that Repave took was by necessity, because of other projects and things that everyone had going on. As we started embracing those time periods off, we started letting these songs just sit in our brains and percolate through driving to work, or doing whatever we were doing." Multi-instrumentalist Thomas Wincek elaborated, "There were times while making this album when we lost the motherfucking plot big time - I think people actually said those words out loud. It was just getting so convoluted."
Throughout the recording process, the band embraced sampling and effects, with guitarist Chris Rosenau stating, "We're not just sitting down at a piano and putting chords together. We're cutting up a sample for the verse and then processing some weird sound for the chorus - and then getting it to sound like a song." Rosenau describes the album's tracks as "convergent evolutions".
Vocalist Justin Vernon did not perform any additional instruments on the album, instead choosing to focus solely on his vocals. Chris Rosenau noted, "[Justin] basically sang on fully fleshed-out songs, but we got to be there and bounce ideas off each other and laugh and cry and all this shit while he was doing these bananas vocal things that no one had ever heard before!" Vernon praised the collaborative process of the band, stating, "I've developed this thing where I just need this band. My body, mind, and heart lean toward Volcano Choir, like, 'Oh, yeah, I gotta see these guys. We gotta make some music.'"
The track "Alaskans", features a sample of poet and novelist Charles Bukowski reading a poem for a French television programme. Regarding its inclusion, vocalist Justin Vernon stated, "The poem starts out with him talking about showering with this woman and washing his ballsack - all this crude Bukowskian stuff-- but by the end he's extremely drunk and crying and he can’t get through it. He's like, “Make it so that I die in my sleep and not in my life.” It’s this incredibly powerful and manly man completely giving into the fact that he is weak and small." Vernon notes that Bukowski was also an influence on his lyrical contributions: "There’s a Bukowski feel to some of the lyrics on the record, pretty sexual things. I’m a pretty shy guy when it comes to girls and sex, but the way that he isn’t afraid of it is good, because everybody has those sorts of animal feelings. Bukowski was like the rap guy when it came to talking about that stuff, and it freed up a lot of what you’d call normal people into making it not such a big deal."
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