December 27, 2008
Bon Iver Review
A good way to resurrect a dead blog is with a "year in review" post. It says to your readers, "sure, I haven't posted all year but I've spent all that time thinking about which albums you should listen to. You're welcome!" Problem is, I hardly listen to anything new anymore.
Maybe I've gotten lazy, but most of my musical needs are met by a couple of old standbys: Silver Jews and Talking Heads. Of course, I finally discovered the genius of Jay Reatard this year but enough has been written about him. A lot has been written about Bon Iver too but that was on last year's reviews. I guess I don't watch enough Grey's Anatomy or House (and can one ever really get enough medical procedurals?), but I hadn't heard Justin Vernon's haunting voice until just a few days ago.
It's hard for any new voice to get heard on my iPod. Even though I regularly load it up with albums that people are talking about and put them in the shuffle rotation, it's so rare that anything makes it past my relentless skipping unless it's familiar. But Vernon's voice kept rising above the comforting to confront me with the new. Maybe it's because he just tries harder, overdubbing himself dozens, even hundreds of times. But Vernon never tries too hard, in fact, the genius of For Emma, Forever Ago is its subtlety.
On many tracks, Vernon backs himself up with an audacious chorus of clones and you can tell he has strong studio chops. But the most breathtaking moments on the record are when Vernon takes a breath. The pauses on "Creature Fear" are Pinteresque. They remind me of the intro to "Wouldn't it be Nice?" with its three beats of silence that feel like a fuse being lit. Of course, those beats aren't truly silent since the drum hit on 1 bounces around the eardrums for a while like a bottle rocket in a sewer.
For Emma feels like a folkier, broodier Pet Sounds but its impact is more like that of The Pixies' (another band I discovered after everyone else) Doolittle. Both The Pixies and Bon Iver give me something I didn't even know was missing from my musical diet: dynamics. I imagine that during the final mix, the engineer called everyone over to his desk just to look at the waveforms they had made together. They would stare at the loud quiet loud shapes like paintings on a gallery wall. Those tiny vocoder moments that last only a fraction of a beat on "The Wolves (Act I and II)" are masterstrokes. The closeness of the mic to the bass drum on "Blindsided" makes me wonder if we can see the painter's surroundings somewhere on the canvas. If we look closely enough, can we hear the paint-spattered boombox in the corner of the studio and smell the model's cigarettes?
I admit that I often relegate music to the role of background noise (at work, the gym etc). My iPod is like faucet and I find myself taking music for granted like I do with running water. I'm grateful that voices like Justin Vernon's can jolt me out of a musical rut just like Frank Black (and David Berman and David Byrne) did forever ago. And Vernon did it without having to scream.
Posted by rsexton at 10:51 PM | Comments (0)