Bon Iver’s new album is on NPR First Listen page, and although it will only be out on June 21st, you can already make your own opinion about this highly anticipated album.
I haven’t listened to it enough to write a full review, this can only be a first impression, as there’s a lot to digest in these 10 tracks, but right away Peter Gabriel came in the picture, through the vocals over these complex arrangements of synths and electric guitars.
There’s a lot of auto-tune to achieve these vocals going from falsetto to other ranges, something I always hate, but I guess it will work for many in this context.
The sound is warm and layered, on the melancholic-soothing side, like a long goalless wandering through the woods where Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, had moved a while ago, as he lived in a hunting cabin in Wisconsin when he recorded ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’, before working with Kanye West on ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’. How did this happen exactly?
Most of the song titles are about confusing places that really do exist, like ‘Minnesota, WI’, ‘Michican’t’, Hinnom, TX’, ‘Calgary’, ‘Lisbon, OH’, as if staying too long in the woods had caused him some intentional disorientation. But you can easily been disoriented yourself with these dense tracks populated by synths, strings, piano or even horns. The music can be a little hypnotic, sleep-inducing, the kind you want to listen to when the sky is grey and you stay inside with a warm tea; yeah it’s not exactly uplifting, but it can be cozy.
With ‘Perth’, the opening track, the atmospheric sound and its jazzy-spacey guitars, does not wake up immediately but when it does it goes into some epic experiment, which sounds familiar and original at the same time. There is a lot of that gentle acoustic guitar guidance on ‘Minnesota, WI’ or ‘Holocene’, despite everything else going on around it. Take ‘Calgary’, a song you can get for free on his website (http://www.boniver.org), the saturation of these warm-wooly-blanket vocals set the mellow tone right away, but the rest seems frozen with hardly any more animation towards the end when the song lightens up. All along the album, there is emotion but I never fully participated for some reasons.
NPR is saying that Vernon has compared the closing track ‘Beth/Rest’ to the best-known work of Bruce Hornsby, and there’s no doubt about it when you hear this synth-saxo combination, it could sound like some Phil Collins’ song for a 80s movie soundtrack, and that’s a little disturbing.
‘Bon Iver’, the album, is like a long cold tunnel of solitude aiming to some mysterious destination (Bon Iver means good winter in French by one letter), but with a more urban setting than his previous album: if ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’ was recorded in a log cabin, this new one was recorded in a defunct swimming pool attached to a veterinarian clinic converted into a studio, and very close to the place where he grew up in Fall Creek, Wisconsin. Locations are important for this album, and Los Angeles may not be the best one to listen to it, so it may grow on me, or not.
Go there to listen to it:
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/09/136855313/first-listen-bon-iver-bon-iver#playlist