Send "Megafaun " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 At this point in their careers, Joe Westerlund and brothers Brad and Phil Cook (all multi-instrumentalists, singers, songwriters, and proud beard owners) are far more well-known for their collaborations and one-offs than their own brand-name works. Besides releasing two quietly acclaimed albums (2008’s Bury the Square and 2009’s Hometapes debut Gather, Form, & Fly), this North Carolina-based trio has recorded, toured, and collaborated with the likes of Akron/Family, the Dodos, and, most famously, Bon Iver. The Megafaun/Bon Iver connection is especially noteworthy considering the musical history. Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon previously served as frontman for the now defunct DeYarmond Edison, a band which also featured Westerlund and the Cooks. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Megafaun and Bon Iver have a lot in common musically. Both groups frequently pull from ancient traditions like folk, Americana, and withered soul, but they’re also too fond of noisy freakouts and ambient soundscapes to fit neatly into any of those genres. Megafaun is actually the freakier and more unpredictable of the two groups. Whether or not this is a good thing depends on your tolerance for laidback, country-inflected tracks rubbing sonic elbows with unpredictable free-jazz workouts. You’re never safe with Megafaun. Just when you think you’ve gotten a handle on their sound, they throw a musical curveball your way. A beautiful folk tune can turn into an orchestral piece at the drop of a fiddle. Heretofore, a 34-minute “mini album”, as the press release calls it (what happened to EP?) serves as an opportunity for the band to regain its identity after working through the endless collaborations and projects that have pushed the Megafaun namesake to the sidelines. An “exercise in songwriting and discipline”, Heretofore was written and recorded quickly (the process took less than two months), but that doesn’t translate to the music, which never sounds half-assed. In fact, the scope of sounds and ideas on display is staggering. But hey, what would you expect from these guys?...full text |
| Tinymixtapes |
| When I interviewed Megafaun’s Phil Cook in April, the band had just written and recorded Heretofore within the space of six weeks. I was lucky enough to get my hands on an unmastered version of the short LP, and even in that raw-ish form, their grounding in “roots music” — the one that somehow incorporated their high school jazz band beginnings with a love of folk and bluegrass — mixed as obviously as ever with a commitment to pushing boundaries. Cook spoke about the balance between tradition and experimentation, the trust between the band’s members, and winning people over by not taking themselves too seriously. It hasn’t taken the trio much time or many songs to win people over. In their short career, Heretofore marks the band’s second album to contain only six tracks. Bury The Square, their 2008 debut, was the same length and was followed quickly by their 2009 sophomore record Gather, Form and Fly. Both releases garnered attention and praise for forging new territory in musical areas that, at least to me, had seemed to refuse the potential for anything still unexplored. In Americana’s safety, though, I was mistaken. Where Gather, Form and Fly left off — the precipice at which all the melodic acoustic guitar and three-part singing and melancholy strings and rambling banjo stopped — is where Heretofore hang-glides off the edge. While Gather hinted at greater ambition than the folk rock of “The Fade,” with orchestral, experimental tracks like “Impressions of the Past,” none resembled Heretofore’s 12-and-a-half-minute “Comprovisation for Connor Pass.” It’s exactly what its name suggests, an improvisation that turned into a composed recording that incorporates suspenseful jazz riffs and straight-up aural anarchy with beautiful melody and near-ambient swaths. Likewise, “Eagle,” a saxophone-laden free jazz wailer, switches from simple Southern rock and handclaps to pancake stacks of chaotic noise with notes sliding down from the top like syrup....full text |
| Pitchfork |
| That's a pretty evocative title for a mini-album like this one, which follows Megafaun's breakthrough full-length, Gather, Form & Fly. The word itself suggests the present moment as the point of intersection between the past and the future, which is exactly where the North Carolina trio find themselves. They tease out old ideas and combine them with new ones, affixing Appalachian folk to classic rock, ambient, avant garde, and a kind of musical entropy that pushes many of their songs into sputtering, oddly compelling noise. On Gather, Form & Fly they found a way to integrate those compositional and decompositional urges, creating songs as postcards from the deepest backwoods: creased and worn, grass-stained and dotted with dirt and grit, possibly crawling with critters, but with a simple, genial message scrawled on each one. Megafaun wrote and recorded these six songs in January and February of this year, with a coterie of friends and fellow musicians chipping in (notably, members of the Slaraffenland adding horns). So the easygoing mood of Heretofore sounds primarily social, at times even gregarious, which crucially gives shape to the band's rickety excursions. "Eagle", with its loping pace and halting melody, crams so many ideas in its seven minutes that it might burst its seams, yet the arrangement moves between them mercurially and with real curiosity. So it's not unexpected to hear studio applause as it winds down; simply keeping the song together sounds like quite a laudable accomplishment. "Eagle" would have slotted nicely in the middle of Gather, Form & Fly, but the instrumental "Comprovisation for Connor Pass" is less familiar and more ambitious. Another carefully chosen word, "comprovisation" involves the creation of a new composition through various improvisations, which means the song rambles with a sense of purpose. Megafaun assemble it patiently over 12 minutes, shifting styles and sounds fluidly. The song dips sharply at the eight-minute mark, increasing the tension before launching into a widescreen finale that is all the sweeter for the long journey that preceded it. "Comprovisation" sounds like a daring piece of music, exciting and absorbing in the way it builds up instead of falling apart....full text |
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