Michicant

There's a ceremonial quality to this song, a sense of ritual enacted with full seriousness and slight mystery. The percussion is central and unusual — it drives the track forward with an almost tribal insistence, while the layered vocals move in and out of intelligibility, sometimes words and sometimes pure sound. Vernon's voice is used here most boldly as a texture-generating instrument, leaping between registers with a kind of physical abandon. The production feels like a sound map of the Wisconsin woods in a particular season — late autumn maybe, or earliest spring, when the landscape is neither one thing nor another. Lyrically the song is dense with imagery that circles around bodies of water and bodies of people, memory and physical place collapsing into each other. There's an erotic undercurrent handled with surprising delicacy, desire described in terms of landscape rather than anatomy. It belongs to folk's long tradition of nature mysticism but updated with modern studio technique, the rough and the polished coexisting without tension. This is a song for late-night listening with headphones, when you want to feel surrounded by something rather than merely hear it, when you're in the mood for music that asks something of you rather than simply delivering sensation.