Album review: 'Bon Iver, Bon Iver'
2.5 stars (out of 4)
Bon Iver’s 2008 debut, “For Emma, Forever Ago,” punctuated a new era of male sensitivity, indie-rock division. Like Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold and Iron and Wine’s Sam Beam, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon connected with the type of earnest, low-key songs that James Taylor once would’ve strummed around the campfire to a gaggle of adoring hippies. Since then Vernon has become something of a mystique-laden cult star – the guy who retreated into the wilderness after breaking up with his band and his girlfriend, made an album full of ghosts and heavenly, broken harmonies that sold more than 300,000 copies, and then got a call to jam with Kanye West in Hawaii.
On the follow-up, “Bon Iver, Bon Iver” (Jagjaguwar), Vernon opens up a bit; instead of holing up by himself with a guitar and laptop, he surrounds himself with musicians. The sound is a good deal plusher, the arrangements thickened with pedal steel, saxophone, horns, percussion. But Vernon still sounds like he’s back in that Wisconsin cabin that birthed “Emma.” His falsetto is the album’s central instrument – sometimes starkly alone, sometimes layered into a cosmic choir, occasionally twisted into an otherworldly, Auto-Tuned wobble.
Horns spiral and thundering drums split open the eulogy “Perth.” “Minnesota, WI” flirts with a reggae rhythm, then pits flutes against banjo. These orchestrations give the songs the feel of movies, evoking the locales suggested in the titles and the memories that come with them. But the album’s middle sags with drifting arrangements and it concludes with a dud: the cheesy, reverb-laden ‘80s pop of “Beth/Rest.”
Vernon gets it right on “Calgary,” though: A song that takes the hushed, hymn-like tone of “For Emma, Forever Ago” and builds it into a tower of yearning. Call it soul music for shut-ins.
greg@gregkot.com