Front Page Reviews & AIR

It’s been over three years since Justin Vernon’s debut as Bon Iver.  While For Emma, Forever Ago… was a deeply personal album (the backstory of the forlorn cabin-in-the-woods solitude has been well-documented), and while it was almost entirely acoustic, it somehow managed to feel strangely ethereal.  It’s hard to think of any other acoustic album that feels so much like a mood album, evoking far more than the lyrics themselves.  I think this was why it took me so long to fully appreciate it.  It wasn’t quite what I expected.  I kept trying to figure out what Vernon was saying in his reverbed falsetto.  What exactly did he mean by “gluey feathers on the flume?”  Over time, though, I was able to let the songs – and the album as a whole – just wash over me.  It was only then that it all seemed to make sense.  There was a certain lack of rationality that seemed only to help evoke the emotional truth at hand.  In this context, the more direct lines became even more weighted, perhaps intentionally.  And the title of the album, sung as the last line of the title track, seemed to say it all.  All of the carefully plucked guitars, emotive falsetto notes and lyrics seemed to hint at something too powerful to say.  Perhaps all of this was ultimately about something or someone that had been lost forever.  And it’s not fair to call it a breakup album, either, because it’s all left open enough – emotionally and lyrically – to evoke so much more than that.  It could be about anything or anyone, about a person or a place, about yourself or your innocence.  The only thing that’s for sure is that there is at once something beautiful and magical, something true on that album.  And it has to do with that something being gone.

I bring all this up because there was such a convergence of things that made For Emma what it was.  It wasn’t just the songs; it wasn’t just the backstory; it wasn’t just the bare and inspired production.  It was all of these things, plus a little bit of magic sprinkled in.  In short, the things that made For Emma so special are the kind of things that are impossible to recreate.  This made for a very interesting kind of anticipation for Vernon’s latest full-length album, Bon Iver, Bon Iver.  We really had no idea what to expect.  And it could have gone wrong in so many different ways.  He could have tried to recreate the inspiration by going back to the old cabin with just his guitar and manufacturing some lovelorn angst.  He could have pulled the old sophomore-album-reinvention trick and try to capitalize on his new-found hip-hop fame (he collaborated with Kanye West on West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy last year).  He could have believed his own hype and gotten all self-important in any number of indulgent ways.  The possibilities for failure were endless.  Instead, however, Vernon worked on building a studio with his brother in his hometown of Eau Claire, WI, just down the street from the house they grew up in.  He brought in his trusty touring band and a select few outside musicians known more for their artistic vision than their recognizable names.   In the end, they emerged with what will, in all likelihood, be the best album of the year.

Bon Iver, Bon Iver manages to achieve the impossible: it is every bit as evocative as For Emma, but in a totally different way.  The opening track, “Perth”, sets the tone perfectly.  It alternates between hushed beauty, unexpected flourishes, and a closing cacophony of electric full-band bursts.  It manages to sound familiar while never falling into a traditional song structure.  Even the instrumentation isn’t quite expected: at its most full, with crashing drums, full-distortion guitars and even horns, there is a curious lack of bass.  Over the next four songs, the vision of the album is brought to fruition, with each song as perfect in its place as the last.  The binding musical vision is an anything-goes freedom of arrangement, with acoustic guitars and muted horns trading time with electro-synths and almost tribal drums that always seem to come in and out at just the right places.  As a musician, the first half of Bon Iver, Bon Iver is inspiring to the point of sheer joy, and bears repeated listens so well that it’s easy to imagine putting it on in twenty years and being just as satisfied. 

Like For Emma, the album manages to evoke all kinds of emotional truth without being explicit about any of it.  And while Vernon’s poetry has taken an even bolder step into the irrational and surreal, once again the straightforward lines bind it together.  “Michicant” opens with the line, “I was unafraid, I was a boy, I was a tender age,” and that’s all you need to know to put the rest of the song into some sort of context.  While it hints at all sorts of things, that simple line grounds the song in a feeling of nostalgia, regret, and humility.  Which can be said for much of the album.  While some of the lyrics could be taken as pretentiously opaque from someone else, Vernon gives us just enough of himself to let us know that he is authentic.  There is a warmth, a kind of human compassion that comes through on this album at every turn, which separates it most music of any style being made right now (or any time, really).  And none of it is conveyed through cheap platitudes or self-serving do-goodery.  When Vernon sings (on “Halocene”), “And at once I knew I was not magnificent,” we don’t get a feeling of self-pity or jealously, but instead a feeling that being “magnificent” is actually possible, and thus his admitted failure to be magnificent is all the more real.

The only drawback of the album is that it doesn’t sustain its uniqueness of vision from front to back.  “Hinnom, TX” is the first departure from the lushness of the first five songs, with a delay-ridden synth providing most of the accompaniment to a dual vocal performance going back and forth between Vernon’s lowest singing yet and an exaggerated Bee Gees-esque falsetto that undercuts the album’s well-earned trust in Vernon’s sincerity and borders on the ironic. “Wash.” is a welcome return to the mood of the album’s first half.  Then the album’s first single (is it weird that Bon Iver has “singles?”), “Calgary”, follows by introducing an 80s synth pad.  “Calgary” is strange because it seems like a fantastic song that doesn’t quite fit on this record.  Or maybe it’s just the choice of the synth-pad-plus-electronic-drums arrangement.  As it is, it serves as a segue (via the instrumental drones of “Lisbon, OH”) to the album’s potentially divisive closer, “Beth/Rest”, which is an out-and-out homage to the sound of cheesy 80s ballads by the likes of Bruce Horsby to Peter Cetera.  It is executed lovingly, and in-and-of-itself it’s endearing, but it certainly detracts from the overall impact of the album.  After having kept that listener fully enclosed in the world of Bon Iver for thirty-four minutes, “Beth/Rest” allows the listener to be distracted by thoughts like “Is he covering ‘Mandolin Rain’?”

But if the worst thing you can say about an album is that it’s not perfect, then it must be pretty special.  And the fact that both his first two albums achieve these heights only shows that Vernon and Bon Iver are no fluke.  It’s not often that the first time I hear an album I know I’ll still be going back to it twenty years from now.