Bon Iver - i,i
The Quietus
“It might be over soon.” Those words, inaugurating 22, A Million – Justin Vernon’s last album as Bon Iver – seemed at the time somehow too pregnant, prophesying something as yet unseen. It’s hard not to return to them upon the release of Bon Iver’s fourth album, i,i, for here indeed something seems to be drawing to a close.
There is something desperately sad about the sound of an important artist losing their footing. Ostensibly much is the same, all the familiar pieces are in place, and yet something fundamental is missing; an animating force reorientating and reordering individual elements to articulate them as more than the sum of their parts. Without it there remains a magician with cards hanging out of their sleeve; an uncanny valley whereby something beloved is laid bare, cast in an unflattering, absurd new light.
The French filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub talked of the importance of something that burned within a shot and, similarly, each of Bon Iver’s previous three releases – 2006’s For Emma, Forever Ago, 2011’s self titled and 2016’s 22, A Million – have burned with the rare luminosity of a Damascene epiphany. Even Vernon’s features (a generous collaborator, his contributions have recently lit up tracks by James Blake, Vince Staples, Bruce Hornsby and Chance the Rapper alongside beatific recent work with Big Red Machine) have a rarefied sense of warmth.
Press around the time of 22, A Million elaborated upon the sense of precarity in the album’s first five words: with Vernon reportedly struggling to find the music, considering shelving the Bon Iver project for good, the album almost didn’t materialise at all. Such reports helped illuminate an album whose music felt unbearably hard-won; the sound of blood from a stone; a sense Vernon had searched through endless Sisyphean iterations to arrive, almost impossibly, at something consecrated.
By comparison, nothing burns in i,i; it simply comes too easy. By all accounts Vernon navigated 22, A Million’s sense of crisis to arrive at a much better place personally and – whilst it is undoubtedly perverse to perpetuate the tired, destructive myth of bad times leading to good music – it’s also impossible to listen to i,i without the feeling a fundamental tension is missing. All the familiar staples are there – Vernon’s soulful falsetto and sharp ear for pop phrasing, hiply obscure lyrics (which, more than ever, I’m convinced are written à la Tom Waits: sound and melody first, words and significance later), dense knots of saxophones, atomised drums, helium-inflated vocal samples, Copland-esque vistas of strings and wind, and that trademark Bon Iver brand of emotional catharsis. Whatever electric charge previously animated these elements to give them such resplendent body and consciousness, however, is absent.
The recipe is largely the same, and perhaps therein lies part of the problem, for there is little here that significantly departs from previous Bon Iver expeditions, to the extent that i,i overall seems defined by the sense of a narrative abandoned, of history relinquished.
It is all very pleasing to the ear and there is much to enjoy on a superficial level. The torchsong balladry of ‘Hey Ma’ or ‘Faith’ follow on almost directly in both feel and arrangement from 22, A Million’s ’33 “GOD”’ and ‘8 (circle)’. The production is immaculate, and headphones open up layer upon layer of lovingly-rendered detail in the album’s pockets and linings.
A roster of indie royalty – Moses Sumney, Jen Wasner, James Blake, Aaron and Bryce Dessner, Bruce Hornsby –add communal warmth and clutter to the album’s packed tracklisting. Many of the tracks are short and featherweight, recalling in part the deft sketches of Frank Ocean’s Blonde whereby songs evaporate rather than finish.
Vernon’s voice is significantly less processed than on 22, A Million, although the results (such as ceiling-scraping squawks of ‘Holyfield’ or the constipated barks of ‘Naeem’) are not always flattering. Overall i,i sounds expensive and yet – simultaneously – all too safe.
Comfort verges on complacency: in the crumbly drums of 22, A Million’s ’10 d E A T h b RE as T’ or the wonky sonics of ’29 #Strafford Apts’ there was the live spark and crackle of risk. Here, even within the more experimental stylings of ‘Holyfields’ or ‘Jelmore’, everything is too familiar, too glibly hip and – frankly – far too self-satisfied.
Vernon recently evangelised that “I’m doing this to show you about you, or us about us” and truly, all i,i demonstrates to me in this respect, is – once again – the failure of comfortable liberalism within late Western capitalism.
Bon Iver isn’t the only one of the indie generation of the noughties who now seems to be losing their grasp. A slow wane of historical purchase also seems evident in the broader critical decline of US indie monolith Pitchfork Media (now four years absorbed into Condé Nast and experiencing a slow exodus of many of the writers who helped establish its bite) who immediately canonised i,i upon its appearance on streaming platforms earlier this month; and – along with them – many of the bands whose careers Pitchfork has helped launch, no more evident than in Arcade Fire’s endless trudge of ever more meaningless music played to ever bigger stadiums.
A friend of mine recently spoke about the ironies of being approached at merch tables by fanboys (always the boys), alternatively ecstatic in their devotion or furious with him for besmirching something they felt was as much theirs as his. Perhaps, in fairness, that is all this is. Chalk it up to a personal taste for modernism that i,i leaves unsatisfied. And yet: in it’s unwillingness to step forwards into the unknown, to submerge itself again within that dialectical madness of possibility in search of something that truly burns, i,i loses the sanctity that has characterised every other Bon Iver release to date. For now, it would seem, history lies elsewhere.
Share this article:
Thu Aug 29 14:26:34 GMT 2019The Guardian 100
(Jagjaguwar)
Apparently, i,i completes a seasonal quartet of Bon Iver albums, starting with the wintry confessions of 2008’s For Emma, Forever Ago and ending now, in autumn. Yet i,i has a brighter, more optimistic and open feel than its “summer” predecessor 22, a Million, with its often impenetrable numerology, distorted Yeezus beats and gutpunch bass. What remains from past seasons is Heavenly Father’s digital gospel, and a little of 00000 Million’s acoustic directness.
But what holds Bon Iver’s ever-evolving backwoods orchestra together is Justin Vernon’s yearning vocals. Less obviously Auto-Tuned than before, words tumble out, meaning slips in and out of focus, and the weirdly annoying anachronisms, gnomic neologisms and ecstatic revelations push you to privilege feeling over thinking. The album peaks somewhere around the heartstopping beauty of Hey, Ma’s drifting, wordless middle eight, a breakdown brimming with inarticulate emotion, barely understood, unmediated.
Continue reading... Sun Aug 11 07:00:44 GMT 2019Pitchfork 88
On his fourth album, Justin Vernon reassembles the familiar Bon Iver elements like a cubist collage, with his voice fearlessly front and center. The result is his most honest and forthright music ever.
Fri Aug 09 05:00:00 GMT 2019Tiny Mix Tapes 80
Bon Iver
i,i
[Jajaguwar; 2019]
Rating: 4/5
It makes a lot of sense when you learn that both Noah Lennox and Justin Vernon have degrees in religious studies; Panda Bear’s seminal Person Pitch and Bon Iver’s last few albums are underlined with a kind of appreciation for religiosity that challenges limp “liberal” skepticism à la Bill Maher while also inspiring much more interesting reactions than “I’m spiritual, but not religious.”
Bon Iver’s 2016 release 22, A Million was a cryptic (literally), yet cogent model of how theology actually functions, what theology can really look like in action. For those understandably jaded by Religion (with a capital “R”) and those unwaveringly guided by faith, Vernon’s music constantly reminds us that theology’s central exigence is doubt, and that despite theology’s exploitation by American Conservativism, its core enterprise is one of communal quivering.
“Are you recording?”
“Yeah.”
As with previous Bon Iver records, loneliness amidst a vast wilderness immediately emerges as a prominent theme of i,i, pronounced “I comma I.” Somewhat ironically, however, though as if on purpose, openers “Yi” and “iMi” establish that this new chapter in the mythos of Bon Iver is one penned by many hands. We hear a snippet of a distorted phone conversation, reportedly recorded several years ago; hesitant and hazy guitar strums; a sharp, skipping voice slice through the fog; a cavalcade of trumpets, violins, synths, guitars, pianos — it’s a neat, but striking bookend to a decade that began with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, a 21st-century tome brimming with features but ultimately riddled with self-doubt, self-deprecation, and self-obsession. Vernon’s work with Kanye is a pertinent point of reflection, as this record’s rollout into public consciousness has coincided with anticipation of Yandhi, and now Jesus Is King. In some regard, it feels as if, almost 10 years after Kanye tectonically shifted music’s landscape, it’s Vernon who’s reaching that Zenith as Kanye’s approaching his descent, enlightened yet incomprehensible.
i,i by Bon Iver
Abstract comparison aside, i,i sounds like a New Testament. As Kanye looks backward on a career that launched with “Jesus Walks,” an assertion that ended up proving Kanye wrong (as evinced by a late-decade gospel trend), Vernon is clearing space here for a future we can all arrive at safely. What’s so remarkable about where Vernon has come since For Emma’s hermetic quietude is how actualized it feels within a greater narrative of climbing up out of desolation, of emerging out of these cracks in popular music. And it’s not that Kanye made Bon Iver famous or even that he created such conditions, rather that both West and Vernon have, throughout their respective careers, harnessed a kind of restlessness of being “Lost in the World” that has, in deeply strange ways, brought people together.
i,i is a record that wrestles with togetherness and our capacity for creating and maintaining it, and it does so in Communion with a disjointed chorus of other voices (James Blake, Bruce Hornsby, Brooklyn’s Youth Chorus, Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner, Moses Sumney, and more). It plays like a collection of first-draft Psalms for a congregation at a Crossroads, or perhaps one persistently and violently driven toward the edge of the World as we know it. It sounds like live recordings from an alternate universe version of Kanye’s Sunday Services. Many song titles on i,i look like pronouns in some sort of post-apocalyptic English creole, one stripped of gender and formality yet re-stratified across boundaries of clusivity (who does “we” include?). Sonically, it embodies climatological anxiety in a deeply soulful way; it’s erratic like our weather patterns, as foreboding (“We”) as it is arrestingly beautiful (“RABi”). Lyrically, it’s as vague and confounding (“And the concrete’s very slow” - Naeem) as it is astonishingly (yet perhaps naively) clear-headed (“Well, it’s all fine and we’re all fine anyway” - RABi).
Vernon has called i,i Bon Iver’s “autumn” album, offering that each previous Bon Iver album has represented one of four seasons. It’s about as much context that’s given about i,i’s themes. In reality, it’s comprised largely of several years of demos and “field recordings” and collected samples and experiments and improvisations. Perhaps that’s why it feels so novel at the precipice of a new decade; after 10(+) years of failed political experiments and improvisations, here’s a new songbook stripped of the arrogance and pretense of capitalist evangelism. Or perhaps that’s all bullshit, as criticism often is, and what we’re beholding here is simply, as Vernon put it, a “fucking banger.” In any case, i,i has me excited for what’s next in music; because whatever inspiration drove its creation, it’s good to hear joy crack through despair like lightning, even if whatever’s up there’s as dead as fall.
The Guardian 40
(Jagjaguwar)
Justin Vernon has been building Bon Iver into an artistic commune of shared ideals – but loses his way in a fog of weak melodies and bad poetry
Perhaps thanks to the stars and stripes looking cool on anything, be it Air Force One or cake frosting, Americans appear a lot more patriotic than they actually are. They’re actually individualists, from pilgrim fathers to gold prospectors and angel investors; Thoreau, Tony Montana, Trump. You can bring in others and become a corporation or a cult, but you’ll still be your own little island, pledging allegiance to the flag in an archipelago of millions.
The only difficulty is in scaling up, a problem now faced by Justin Vernon. When his group Bon Iver started out, he was on his own: a guy going to a cabin in north-west Wisconsin, unwell, newly single, and in a creative rut. After three months, living off venison he hunted, he came back with For Emma, Forever Ago, a staggeringly beautiful and emotive set of songs written on guitar. This was American individualism in its most idealised form: white, male, overcoming adversity, and acknowledging nature’s beauty only to try something even better.
Continue reading... Thu Aug 08 11:00:17 GMT 2019