“Spell”
VIA SOUNDCLOUD
To date, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon has dominated that niche but potent sub-genre, “vocoder-heavy a capella songs about loneliness in nature.” In 2009, “Woods” altered pop’s course; this year’s darker “715 - cr∑∑ks” attempted to break the conventions that settled in the years following Vernon’s initial cultural earthquake. With “Spell,” the DIY pop artist Emily Reo joins him in that obscure but nourishing bracket. The processor breaks her voice into fragments, like her throat had been replaced with crystalline organ pipes, as she sings haltingly about wildfires and mudslides. These are her cravings, extreme cures for a numb emotional state: “I can’t feel anything/I don’t heal anything,” she sings, making each syllable into a full, sweeping movement.
She repeats the line over and over, turning it into a kind of mantra, as pinpricks of sound light up around her: the tiniest golden strand of violin, bell sounds as tiny and iridescent as glitter. They reproduce and amass until the saturation becomes overpowering—like the scene in an anime movie where the hero ascends into the air and becomes enveloped by a chrysalis of transformative light. Reo told Rookie that she was “trying to express how everything can appear calm on the outside, but there’s all this internal conflict that can end up growing to the point of actually controlling you.” This effect also feels true to the song’s name: a charm of protection, and rejuvenation.
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