BON IVER

Justin Vernon stops making sense on ‘Bon Iver, Bon Iver’

By The Burg Staff on Jul. 06, 2011
BY MATT ASHARE

MAN WITH A PLAN: Justin Vernon as Bon Iver

Heartbreak remains one of the more reliable muses for aspiring singer-songwriters — which, perhaps, is just another way of saying that the bar is set fairly high for artists intent on bearing their emotional scars to the world. Justin Vernon cleared that bar handily when, in 2007, he left the obscure Raleigh, N.C.-based band DeYarmond Edison, returned to his hometown of Eau Claire, Wisc., sequestered himself in his father’s hunting cabin, and poured his damaged soul into For Emma, Forever Ago. Credited to Bon Iver (allegedly an intentional misspelling/simplification of bon écrivain, French for “good writer”), the disc not only revealed Vernon to be a better than merely “good” songwriter in the indie-beardo vein of Iron & Wine’s scruffy Samuel Beam, it also hinted at his burgeoning talents as a producer capable of sculpting starkly captivating, if somewhat skewed, soundscapes as richly evocative as the plaintive falsetto he favors.
     Emma easily secured for Vernon/Bon Iver the status of critics’ darling. But it was an improbable invitation from rapper Kanye West, who wanted to sample a section of the Bon Iver tune “Woods” for the track “Lost In the World” on his 2010 disc My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, that put Bon Iver on a much larger stage. Literally. West subsequently brought Vernon into the studio to record additional vocal tracks. Then, at a 2010 NYC gig, West surprised fans who’d packed the Bowery Ballroom by having Vernon join him on “Lost In the World.“ Earlier this year, Vernon and West did it again in front of a much larger crowd — somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000 — at the Coachella Festival in Indio, Calif.
     The exposure Vernon’s garnered for Bon Iver through West may go a long way toward explaining the anomalous position the new Bon Iver, Bon Iver attained on the Billboard “Top 200” sales chart last week. The disc hit the ground running at No. 2, right below Jill Scott’s The Light of the Sun. (To put that in some perspective, that put Bon Iver, Bon Iver a full six spots up from Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, which sold over a million copies when it hit the racks the last week of May.)
     Vernon hasn’t made any major concessions in the general direction of anything one might consider mainstream accessibility with Bon Iver on the new album. In fact, in many ways it’s a much stranger, if no less enchanting, beast than Emma, which had a backstory to ground it in something resembling a traditional narrative. It’s as if, having gotten “Emma” off his chest, Vernon’s found a more abstract muse and the poetic license to stop making sense. Here’s a sample verse, as posted on the Jagjaguwar blog, from the disc’s serenely textured opening track, “Perth”: “In a mother, out a moth/Furling forests for the soft/Gotta know been lead aloft/So I’m ridding all your stories/What I know, what it is, is pouring — wire it up!“
     Six of the disc’s ten tracks appear to be named for places real, like “Perth” and “Lisbon, OH,“ or imagined (“Minnesota, WI” and “Michicant”), but only one, the hushed, finger-picked, vaguely countrified “Holocene,“ actually mentions a specific locale (Milwaukee) in its lyrics.
The more straightforwardly titled “Towers,“ a jangly and at times even jaunty tune that puts a poppy twist on Bon Iver’s generally somber tone, delivers several arresting images (“Oh the sermons are the first to rest/Smoke on Sundays when you’re drunk and dressed/Out the hollows where the swallow nests”). But, good luck locating an allusion to anything that even approximates a tower.
     The reason behind Vernon’s rhymes may be a mystery, but from start to finish, Bon Iver, Bon Iver is more about creating mood than meaning. Vernon electronically pitch-shifts his multi-tracked falsetto just enough to give it a touch of the otherworldly. And, while many of the arrangements are spare, they’re never quite spartan. In fact, along with a number of familiar Bon Iver enablers, Vernon flew string arranger Rob Moose (the National, Antony and the Johnsons), pedal steel master Greg Leisz, and a horn section whose individual credits include playing with everyone from Tom Waits to the Arcade Fire into his Wisconsin studio to help vary the tone and texture of the recording. There are even times — the midsection of “Calgary,“ for one — when distorted guitars and a propulsive backbeat bring Bon Iver fairly close to sounding like a trad rock band. For a committed non-formalist like Vernon, that might constitute a major leap forward.
http://www.the-burg.com/blogit/entry/justin_vernon_stops_making_sense_on_bon_iver_bon_iver