The evolution of the urban bushwhacker

Justin Vernon, when he became Bon Iver, went out to the woods, Henry David Thoreau-style, to clear his head. Like Pecknold, though, he was able to take Pro Tools with him. "For Emma, Forever Ago" is a collection of tracks he made in his parents' hunting cabin outside Eau Claire in the dead of winter. The romance of his isolation has helped him attract listeners, but it's what he did with the little bit of technology he could haul with him that makes his music so startlingly rich.

Bon Iver's new EP, "Blood Bank," expands on the layered vocals and ambient sonic pathways Vernon laid down on "For Emma," and proves that Vernon isn't just a novelty artist. Now working with a small band, he widens his path in several directions. The title track is a sexy little story of a coupling that comes after a donation to the Red Cross; it's fairly conventional. But on two other tracks, the piano-driven "Babys" and the Auto-Tuned "The Woods," Vernon shows that for someone committed to the semirural life (he's an avid hunter) he's blessedly uninterested in isolating himself.

A dense keyboard cacophony forms a base in "Babys," Vernon's slightly horror-stricken song about the urge to procreate. It sounds as much like a foray into classical minimalism as a pop song. And "The Woods," the EP's high point, seems almost like an answer to Kanye West's exploration of Auto-Tune, "808s and Heartbreak" -- a welcome antidote to the geeky white-boy supremacy of indie rock.

Built around a four-line poem about trying to mellow out, and a melody that sounds more like contemporary R&B than folk-rock, "The Woods" grows more and more intense as Vernon adds layers of his Auto-Tuned voice. "I'm building a still to slow down the time," he croons, using the resolutely rural image of a whiskey shack; but the sound is slyly urban, the sensual roar of a self-styled soul man. Making explicit the connection between country and soul, Vernon makes a claim for the title of most forward-looking urban bushwhacker yet.

Erik Davis, the writer whose work might best capture the complexities of the urban bushwhacker world, recently wrote a column for Arthur magazine in which he played with the idea of embracing the economic slowdown.

"Slow time could be seen as elastic time," he wrote. "Once you slow down enough, you can see all the things that need help and care, and you have more time to attend to them, and more time to creatively respond to difficulties and constraints. If the slowdown is not too catastrophic, it will carve out more room in time and space for individuals and communities to take responsibility for their lives and localities and for some of the myriad grass-roots solutions that already exist to take root."

This might be the real calling of the bushwhackers: to respond to the impending scarcity that's come hand in hand with cultural acceleration by taking up their tools and making a new path. There's an aspect of escapism to what they're doing. But pushing through the underbrush, they've found a way to breathe.

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ann.powers@latimes.com