Music

Bon Iver: i,i review – his first ever misfire


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.

Perhaps fleeing from that myth, Vernon tried to lose himself in group dynamics: spinoffs such as Volcano Choir and collaborators like Kanye West and James Blake, while growing Bon Iver to a big, strident band. Twenty-eleven’s self-titled album ended up installing him as a soft-rock frontman, but he gouged away at the troubadour image with 2016’s excellent 22, a Million, which brought in impressionistic samples and turned up the dials on his vocal processors. He co-founded People, an artist collective with the National’s Dessner brothers, and recorded an album with them as Big Red Machine, also excellent. Like a burgeoning hippy paradise, Bon Iver continues to attract ever more disciples: new album i,i features three dozen supporting players, mostly previous collaborators like Blake, the Dessners, the Staves, Francis Starlite, Poliça, and Bruce Hornsby, plus a saxophone unit dubbed Sad Sax of Shit.

But as anyone who saw Wild Wild Country or read The Beach will tell you, a burgeoning hippy paradise reaches a point where leadership gets blurred, people pull in different directions, and the dream sours. i,i is this point for the Bon Iver project, resulting in Vernon’s first misfire.

There is lots of prettiness and some innovative production, like the tumbles of wordless vocal on iMi, gently insulated by downy static; Vernon’s gospel holler and falsetto curlicues will always make ears prick up. But frequently, including on iMi, his melodies are uninspired, feeling like the first thing he came up with while woodshedding around the backing track – on songs like Salem and Jelmore, he squats in his comfort zone, letting his voice wander down well-worn pathways. The soulful little motif of Marion is OK, but feels like throat-clearing that on previous records would have led to a bigger pronouncement; here he reaches lazily for some half-hearted cooing and a listless “woo”. Without strong songs, these soulful ad-libs veer on self-parody. Twice he sings of “tokes” and you rather suspect he’s been toking all too hard: the lyrics feature a few lucid pleas for understanding (“what I think we need / is elasticity”) amid acid-addled sermonising. It is almost impossible to make a sax solo boring, but the witless Sh’Diah manages it.

Bon Iver: i,i album artwork



Bon Iver: i,i album artwork

There is admittedly a three-song stretch at the heart of the album that can compete with the rest of his catalogue. Hey, Ma is one of his best ever songs, its proper melody all the more tangible for coming after the mere simulacra before it; it has a subtle, powerful head-nod rhythm, and real bite to the scorn of its central lyric, “full time you talk your money up / while it’s living in a coal mine.” A withering judgment, perhaps of fossil-fuel lobbyists but probably just bullshitters everywhere, it has the simultaneous specificity and metaphor of the most resonant lyricism. U (Man Like) has Hornsby happily plonking at the piano like a rural schoolma’am, and the song could be a secular hymn in the Bon Iver commune; the call and response on the stirring Naeem could be hollered out in the fields at harvest time. These songs have Vernon’s most bracing quality: a sense that a fog has cleared and he’s singing about what he can suddenly see. That fog closes in on the rest of the album, leaving Vernon baffled and lost.

So many American cults and companies can’t scale up, and collapse, their members becoming true individuals again. It would be a shame if this happened here, and Vernon went back to that cabin with an acoustic guitar: at his best, he points to a new way for songs to live and prosper. But if he is trying to build Bon Iver into a mini-utopia of shared values – the kind so many Americans strive towards, be it a startup, a gated suburb, a hippy commune or an ethno-state – he needs to be a stronger leader.



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