Megafaun and Justin Vernon play together in Durham, but don’t expect DeYarmond Edison

Megafaun feat. Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) & Nick Sanborn (Sylvan Esso)
The Pinhook, Durham
Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Last night, a few songs into his band’s first set in nearly two years, Megafaun’s Brad Cook made a circle at the center of the stage. He talked and signaled to the other three members, counting off numbers and nodding in recognition. He stepped back to his microphone, and drummer Joe Westerlund cantered into the beat of “Ain’t No More Cane.” The harmonies rang rich and ragged for the song’s declarative opening line, suggesting a band that was a bit out of practice but certainly not out of its comfort zone. They knew this song; they could, and did, play it with near-preternatural ease.

Eight years ago, “Ain’t No More Cane” was a set regular for the four musicians—Brad Cook, Phil Cook, Justin Vernon and Joe Westerlund—who stood onstage last night at The Pinhook. But they weren’t called Megafaun then; instead, they were DeYarmond Edison, a quartet of Wisconsin friends who had moved to Raleigh to test the experimental limits of their heartland folk-rock in a music scene they’d correctly heard was budding. (You can read and see them from that era here.)

Not long after the move, as the fable goes, the band fractured into uneven parts—Westerlund and the Cook brothers started Megafaun, while Justin Vernon retreated to a cabin in northern Wisconsin to emerge with the material that would make him quite famous as Bon Iver.

Last night, Vernon joined Megafaun for the entirety of its return to the stage, but this wasn’t a DeYarmond Edison reunion. In that band, Vernon was the clear frontman, a boundary that the quartet desperately tried to break during a residency at Raleigh’s long-gone Bickett Gallery. Still, I remember versions of “Ain’t No More Cane” in that same space when the young quartet seemed as if it were actively splitting apart at the seams, Westerlund slapping the big cymbals of his little drum kit as Vernon began to scream those verses. In the intervening years, however, they’ve all found their respective, individual paths and the newfound confidence such a process can bring. Westerlund’s become an in-demand touring drummer and background vocalist, his reedy voice fitting like an old Southern glove. And during Megafaun’s long pause, the Cooks have made strong careers from production and sideman work, working with folks that would have sounded like fantasies back then. And if you’re reading this, I assume you’re familiar with Vernon’s taglines.