Bon Iver, Blood Bank

Last year, flannel-shirted Southerner Justin Vernon trekked out to a snowy cabin in Wisconsin to recover from one grizzly bear of a break-up. He came back with a new name, Bon Iver, and a haunting 2008 debut, For Emma Forever Ago — a collection of lo-fi, beardy-boy folk ballads so wrenching, it was the ice-pick that cracked critics 'hard little hearts wide open. eMusic named For Emma the sixth best album of 2008, so expectations for Vernon's much-anticipated new EP are high. Luckily, Blood Bank blows up Vernon's fireside hymns into fully-formed jams — it's just the step he needs to venture out of the woods and into the world.

For one thing, Bon Iver has expanded from the quiet, votive-candle flickerings of one man's acoustic guitar to the sound of a real band, complete with slide guitar. And Vernon's high-lonesome voice has gotten less wounded, his storytelling sharper than before. The title track — a highlight of the EP — is a love story set at a blood bank, with no detail spared: the vials filled with fluid, the crescent moon in the sky, the kiss in a parked car afterward. Layers of crackling electric guitars just amp up the tension. With its delicate strumming, "Beach Baby" sounds more like a strong outtake from Emma, but "Babys" feels fresh and invigorating — a bone-rattling, piano-banging ode to the kind of idealized summer love you can only dream up on a winter day. The biggest surprise is "The Woods," a vocoder-heavy a capella anthem with multi-tracked harmonies and all the emotion of an old soul classic. That's the beauty of Bon Iver — even when he's Auto-tuned out like a robot, he channels so much warmth. We await his cameo on the next T-Pain record.