Sometimes Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon must wonder if it’s all a slightly delirious day-dream. Four and a half years ago, he was wintering in a Wisconsin cabin, channelling the painful ending of a long-term relationship into the raggedly haunting ballads that would comprise his debut For Emma, Forever Ago. Fast forward to today and Kanye West’s occasional wing-man sits atop the alternative pop food-pyramid. Critics swoon at his feet, artists line-up to collaborate with him, he’s even been asked to endorse a brand of whiskey. When he recently took a call from Neil Young to discuss a hook-up it is unclear which of them was hoping to bask in the other’s reflected glory.
For his second album, there was no doomed romance to draw on, no backwoods out-house in which to mooch. This, you sense, suited Vernon just fine. Recorded with his touring band in a luxury studio, Bon Iver is a gauzy, elusive affair, concerned with pure musical expression rather than heart-on-sleeve venting or campfire storytelling. It certainly doesn’t try very hard to appeal to the floating vote who arrived late to For Emma, transforming it from blogger crush to international hit. With vocals layered upon vocals and multi-track guitars softly shimmering, Bon Iver goes out of its way to be obtuse – it takes four or five listens before its subtleties begin to reveal themselves, up to which point trying to immerse yourself in the record is akin to scaling sheer glass. You want something to grab onto, yet all is mysterious and impenetrable.
The bad news it is that nothing here rivals the gorgeous immediacy of For Emma stand-outs ‘Flume’ or ‘Skinny Wolves’. Extravagantly ethereal, ‘Holocene’ and ‘Lisbon OH’ flutter past in a haze of furrow-browed introspection, Vernon’s falsetto smokily unfurling against a swell of parping horns and ghostly rhythms. The closer you listen, the stranger the material feels, its intensity couched in an otherworldliness that seems slightly narcotic. For great swathes, Bon Iver isn’t so much a collection of songs as a stormy passage that requires you to readjust your expectations and surrender to its peculiar ebbs and flows.
There is one genuine clunker in the form of 80s power ballad-referencing closer ‘Beth/Rest’. Somewhere between Michael McDonald and Christopher Cross, it wouldn’t be out of place sound-tracking Miami Vice. If this is what Vernon’s attempt at a big pop pay-off sounds like, be grateful that, for the rest of the album, he is more intent on evoking mood than pandering to casual fans. In sum, Bon Iver is a difficult record to get into, but once you’re there chances are you won’t want to leave.