Surely we’re the target audience for a Bon Iver collaborator? Oh?

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[5.50]Megan Harrington: There is a very fine line between glistening icicle folk and the Exorcist score. When the children’s voices drop in, “Crown the Pines” crosses it.
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Anthony Easton: There is this sweet spot where New Age music and “easy listening” worked out some issues in the early ’70s and made work that was sublime and beautiful. It was soft and tender. I am thinking of work like Robbie Basho, who sort of went broke and was forgotten for years. Both genres are in the middle of a revival, where the decorative or the pretty is no longer considered improper. Bands like Holocene or music by the Emeralds or the awesomely named Dolphins Into the Future take the fear of pretty and just shred it into something expansive, gorgeous, formalist. Maybe there are other things going on here — like how math rock sort of sounds like prog, or about the new earnestness, or whatever Sufjan is doing. “Crown The Pines” sounds very of the moment, and I can imagine all of the words that are used to dismiss it, but I love this. I find it beautiful, haunting, expertly crafted, eerie, on the right side of difficult, artful. Those are all adjectives, because like other great spiritual moments, it gets very close to describing the ineffable, and fails nobly.
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Alfred Soto: Several influences, smushed and reconstituted: Brian Wilson, Dan Bejar, Animal Collective. Lovely string section too. If the vocal was less wet — less yearning — this would be worth a relisten. And what the hell is up with his name?
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Katherine St Asaph: It stands to reason, really: if I mostly like the derivation of Bon Iver that makes Poliça, I mostly won’t like the derivation of Bon Iver that makes this. He sings like the choirmaster’s behind him with a rifle. As for pastoral birdsong-artsong stuff, I’ve been listening to Caroline Polachek’s Arcadia (as Ramona Lisa) a lot over the past week, and — this is one of the rare times I’ll say this, so cherish it — I prefer it because it takes itself so much less seriously.
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Patrick St. Michel: It’s pristine, ornate, like a 3-D puzzle of Bon Iver’s cabin where all the chips and scratches have been turned into deceptively pretty  Styrofoam. It’s Owen Pallet forced to wander around a forest and write  only about trees. It sure sounds pretty, but feels a little too polished.
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Scott Mildenhall: Music to panic to, silently. It’s at once sparse and frantic, like being sat on your own and having work to do urgently, only you don’t really know how to do that work, and though you’ll muddle through somehow it won’t be very good, because in what was really a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy you’ve procrastinated for so long that you don’t have the time to learn how to do it properly, and it’s not like there’s anyone here to show you now, is there? Sort of like that.
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Edward Okulicz: Love the sour swoon of the violins and the unsteady, frightened mumblings Carey opens the song with and reverts to over its course. It sounds like a devotional from someone dying in a pool of their own blood or fear. Don’t love the choral interjections; here “intrusion” or even “invasion” might be more appropriate.
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Brad Shoup: Post-rock never did have its crossover moment, did it? It barely had a moment at all. Tremulous tenors singing the rounds, skittery snare work, weeping violins: I’m all for supporting primary-school music education, but this is as good as an argument as I’ve heard for learning to DJ.
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