Sunday, June 19, 2011

Bon Iver: Bon Iver ? review

(Jagjaguwar)

This time there is no girl, and no log cabin. The two romantic standbys that made Bon Iver's much-loved debut album, For Emma, Forever Ago (2008), so lonesome and compelling do not figure on Bon Iver's second release.

Of course the cabin where Bon Iver's Justin Vernon retreated to recover from mononucleosis, mourn a lost band and a lost love in 2006-7 is still standing out in the wilds of Wisconsin. But its meagre facilities have been superseded by Vernon's new studio, built by hand from the shell of an old veterinary clinic. And Vernon is in a more expansive mood this time, thanks to three years in which the success of his sad-soul campfire record led to an eclectic glut of collaborations ? most prominent among them that with Kanye West on his My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album.

Inevitably, then, Bon Iver is a rather different record to Emma: less hermetically sealed, less wintry, less monomaniacal, less hurt. Vernon's signature soulful falsetto remains a constant ? a yearning multitracked croon that has more in common with, say, TV On the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe than it does all the acoustic backwoodsmen to which Vernon has been compared (Iron & Wine's Sam Beam, for one). Every so often, on tracks like "Minnesota, WI", Vernon's vocal drops down to a rumble but never loses its stamp.

Even though things are looking up, Bon Iver (the album) still retains the dreamy, mournful, ruminative qualities that made its predecessor so compelling. And the new developments are startling. "Minnesota, WI" boasts African-derived guitars, great farts of bass and saxophone. Having guested on Kanye West's baroque hip hop opus, Vernon seems to have absorbed many of West's maximalist production values ? or at least given himself permission to pursue his own.

"Perth", the first and most audacious track on the album, features some military rat-a-tat drumming. Bon Iver (his band) weigh in with muted multitracking, percussive rattles and a saturated sound that feels completely at odds with the woebegone mood of For Emma. Until, that is, you recall that what really made Emma exceptional wasn't the cabin, or the girl, but how Vernon added lustre to those old narrative chestnuts with ghostly effects and textures of found sound. Rather than spooky-spartan, that production is now pimped, lush and tinged with Auto-Tune, oscillating electronics and bicycle bell; the tracks segue into one another like unfurling thoughts. But this is still recognisably a Bon Iver record, orbiting around a guitar and Vernon's effects-laden vocals; and a very good one at that.

Mythologies endure because they appeal to the deepest storytelling part of our cortex. Some fans of For Emma might miss the first album's heroine and the other Aristotelian unities that made it so satisfying. Others will surely baulk at the Bruce Hornsby homage of the final track, "Beth / Rest". This time around, however, Vernon is writing love songs to a series of places, some real ("Lisbon, OH", "Wash."), some imagined ("Hinnom, TX"), as though giving Sufjan Stevens a hand with his abandoned 50 States project. Vernon's focus has widened but his strange siren song is just as alluring.

Rating: 4/5


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