Bon Iver - Bon Iver (4AD)
4/5
By: Stan Morgan
For Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, following up 2008’s For Emma, Forever Ago with anything remotely deserving of comparison seemed like an almost impossible task. To say that people put the album on a pedestal would be a vast understatement - it’s become sacrilegious to utter a word against it in most music circles, even if at times it was not as perfect as some would have you believe (death threats to the usual address please). Having a critically acclaimed debut can, inevitably, lead to the artist becoming a victim of their own success, equally likely to damage the follow-up artistically as commercially, especially if the artist deliberately tries to emulate the style of their debut.
Bon Iver has seemingly avoided retracing the steps he took making For Emma…, resisting the temptation to lock himself away in a remote cabin with an acoustic guitar and a bottle of whiskey, and instead recording his album in a studio(?!?!). The instrumentation has also been changed for the follow-up, expanding the palette to include electric guitar, strings, piano and soft, The National-esque horns. The growing number of instruments has accompanied a growing number of band members, with Vernon now joined by Matthew McCaughan, Michael Noyce and Sean Carey (who released his own, excellent album All We Grow last year). Bon Iver is the first full-length release to feature the full band, after the stop-gap Blood Bank EP, which hinted at the fuller sound evident on the album, but stopped short of revealing all of the tricks that would follow.
One thing that hasn’t changed in the years between albums is Vernon’s voice. His exquisite use of multi-tracking found on his debut has been carried over to this album, and it’s something that would certainly have been missed were it not present. Any fans who may have been worried by Bon’s flirtations with auto-tune manipulation with Kanye West, Gayngs and on Blood Bank track ‘Woods’ can rest assured that no such nonsense has made it onto his latest album, at least not in as jarring a form as many of us might have expected. Lyrically there hasn’t been much change, still as cryptic and as personal as For Emma…, with every track on the album supposedly linked to a place or event that holds some kind of significance for Vernon.
Album opener ‘Perth’ makes a bold statement about how the band has evolved, starting with a delicate overdriven guitar motif, before releasing Bon Iver’s inner rock god, with distorted guitars chomping their way through power chords that Neil Young would be proud of. Any of you lucky enough to have seen Bon Iver live since the release of For Emma… will know that the band have the potential to be as devastating as a rock monster as they are in a more intimate environment (see live performances of ‘Bloodbank’ for evidence), and the change in pace is a more than welcome one.
It isn’t clear to see if any of Vernon’s extra-curricular activities have had a profound effect on the sound of the record, there aren’t any hip-hop drums or songs about porn stars taken from his time spent with Kanye West, nor are there any overly clever, experimental tracks inspired by his Volcano Choir work. His contribution to the Gayngs album can be seen to have had an effect on album closer ‘Beth/Rest’, with smooth yacht-rock synths and X-rated sax splurges, but the track isn’t representative of the majority of the album, standing somewhat apart from the rest of the tracks, separated from the mainland by an instrumental interlude (‘Lisbon, OH’).
The one inter-record venture which may have had an effect on the album as a whole is the brief association with Peter Gabriel - Vernon covered Gabriel’s ‘Come Talk To Me’ for the B-Side to Gabriel’s cover of Bon Iver’s ‘Flume’. The instrumentation used in much of the album is reminiscent of much of Gabriel’s solo work, and Vernon’s vocal delivery style serves to highlight the similarity. The comparison is most evident on ‘Holocene’, an initially straight-forward picked acoustic number which swells as it moves towards an affecting climax, sounding at points like a weary rendition of ‘Solsbury Hill’.
While each song on the album is nearly flawless in most ways, and clearly show the scope of Vernon’s enviable talents, the album lacks a cohesion that the majority of truly great albums possess. While it doesn’t spoil the record, or prevent it from being one of the best you’ll hear this year, it stops it short of becoming a classic and outshining what he achieved on his debut. Future collaborations with Lil Wayne amongst others loom on the horizon, but it’s reassuring to know that even with these distractions, Bon Iver will be able to come back and produce a record that intrigues and dazzles in equal measure, and will inevitably leave his listeners desperate for more.
Artists in this article: Bon Iver
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