Bon Iver: 22, A Million

BON IVER: 22, A MILLION (2016)

1) 22 (OVER S∞∞N) 2:48; 2) 10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄; 3) 715 - CRΣΣKS; 4) 33 “GOD” 3:33; 5) #Strafford APTS; 6) 666 ʇ; 7) M♢♢N WATER; 8) 8 (circle); 9) ____45_____; 10) 00000 Million.

Okay, I think I get it now. It's some of that damn Illuminati business, man. Justin Vernon is their secret weapon — by unleashing him upon the world and using both mainstream and alternative rock critics as their helpless puppets, they are planning to disorient us, confuse us, corrupt and subjugate our aesthetic values and ultimately plunge the world into so much confusion that Kanye West might be able to become president and give the launch codes to Somali pirates, while we're all busy discussing Bon Iver's latest message to humanity. And these song titles? Aren't they already imprinted in your mind like proper subliminal messages, to be activated by the New Or­der at just the right moment?

So even if I'm assuming the highly ungrateful role of Cassandra here, I will still go out and say it, and maybe one or two of you nuclear survivors will have the opportunity to thank me ten or so years from now: to a certain extent, the sound and image of 22, A Million was predictable, be­cause when somebody's search for new and unprecedented ways of self-expression overrides one's talent so mercilessly, the results look something like this. Of course, a radical turn into the direction of sampling, Auto-tuning, and crossbreeding neo-folk with electronica was inevitable for this guy, although the scope of it couldn't have been properly guessed. And, of course, the pro­cess of such cross-breeding was far more important to him than actually caring that the record made some sort of sense. And why bother crafting a record that would make some sort of sense, anyway, if fans and critics alike will be all too happy to invent it for you?

Here, have some frickin' quotes. "22, A Million is comparatively strange and exploratory, but its worries are more existential... nearly all of its songs contain a question of some sort, as if Vernon’s own reckoning with the inevitability of decay has led him to interrogate every last thing he’s seen or known" (Pitchfork). "The wonder of 22, A Million is how beautifully he melds the disparate forms—inside and outside, acoustic and digital, past and future, ground level and interstellar" (Spin). "With his long-awaited third album, Vernon completely breaks from his guitar-hugging persona, leaving it in the woods like a Coen brothers corpse as he flexes a mastery of processed vocals, samples, loops, beats, synths and noise, along with more familiar trappings" (RollingStone)... you get the drift already, don't you?

So it's either Illuminati or the man found some serious Al Capone stash buried right under his log cabin, with which he was able to buy up all the significant media sources — because, while I did honestly try to entertain, nurture, and re-kindle the possibility of this being, like, you know, a good album after all, even over the course of several listens... well, gut instincts don't lie: just as in the case of his prior two albums, each new listen only brought an additional wave of disgust, so at least in that respect he's demonstrating a delightful stability. And yes, maybe it is just me and I am still not getting something about all this, but so far, not a single one of these reviews has taken even a tiny step towards convincingly clarifying what that «something» could be.

Roughly speaking, 22, A Million is an alien-dimensional take on neo-folk, consisting of three steps: (a) write some fairly bland, hookless, nowhere-near-innovative melodies on the intersec­tion of rootsy Americana and New Age; (b) fill 'em up with lyrics that can barely pass the Turing test, but might serve as fodder for lengthy, bloody battles of interpretation; (c) twist, distort, cut up, paste the material with as many technological devices and in as many different ways as your engineer might suggest. As Pitchfork says, "nearly all of its songs contain a question of some sort", and they do, oh yes they do. For instance: "Why is the accappella melody of ʽ715ʼ com­pletely hidden under a wall of Autotune?" (Oh, excuse me, that's not Autotune proper, it's some brand-ass-new device called ʽthe Messinaʼ after the name of Vernon's engineer. I'm sure this technical detail makes a lot of artistic difference). Lo and behold, now your life has meaning, because you can spend the rest of it answering that question.

But to return to that old crudeness and bluntness: The melodies on 22, A Million lack memora­bility or originality (I don't think there's really a single chord sequence on here that could not have been used up by the likes of a James Taylor sometime in the past — and, as much as I remain skeptical of the overall artistic merit of Sufjan Stevens, that guy does everything that Bon Iver is capable of and much, much more). The lyrics make no sense whatsoever, except for a few individual lines, and the individual lines are usually nauseatingly pretentious ("Must've been forces that took me on them wild courses / Who knows how many poses that I've been in" — un­less he's been Napoleon in one of his past lives, I'm not prepared to buy this), and it is self-un­derstood that humor and self-irony will be prosecuted if they ever find themselves on Justin Vernon's property. And the «special effects», beginning with the triumphant Unicode of the song titles and ending with all the psychedelic / futuristic / faux-avantgarde sampling and encoding, are little more than annoying. Most of the time, it simply sounds like a kid having fun with his laptop. The kid will find it delightful to turn his voice into a chipmunk's every now and then, but there's simply no reason whatsoever for a grown-up person to do so on the very first line of the very first song and then pretend that it has some artistic significance — or, worse still, prod us into disco­vering, intellectually-symbolically or emotionally-supernaturally, that significance.

If the first album was simply boring, and the second album was intolerable because it intentio­nally presented obsolete crappy values as the new Art, then the third one is simply an anti-artis­tic scam — a new low in an already fantastically atrocious career. So why is it that, out of all the gazillions of «experimental» albums released every year, people were ready to fall specifically for this one? Is it the Kanye West endorsement? Is it some sort of irresistible tug that you get when you take two of the most fashionable things of the past decade — the folksy bearded loner and the digital studio processing technology — and mash them together with full force? Is it that the words he chooses for his songs hit some sort of generational nerve, and that his arrangement of these words actually carries a manipulative effect? Or is it simply that so many of us have such a mad craving for a soft, whiny, vulnerable falsetto to take as a partner in weeping over the dis­heveled and confused state of the world? So much so, that even when that falsetto is distorted with five billion layers of Autotune, we take this as a symbolic representation of all the unbea­rable burdens and unsolvable problems that pin the Vulnerable Little Man down to the ground? Oh look at me, I'm almost beginning to rant like a Pitchfork reviewer already.

Whatever — I say shake off the haze, cut the crap, and call this one of the most stupid, misguided, and phoney albums of the year 2016. If you want some actual folksy sadness that sounds real, for a change, go listen to True Sadness by the Avett Brothers, who lay no claims whatsoever to Big Fat Innovation, do not put dumb effects on their voices, hardly ever use one special symbol from the user-defined area in their song titles, yet somehow seem to pack more emotion and plain old common sense in a single song than Justin Vernon manages to smear over half an hour of his «muzak of the future». Sure, there's nothing adventurous whatsoever about True Sadness, but when it comes to choosing between (a) sitting in front of the fireplace and sipping hot tea on a cold evening, or (b) wrapping your wife's panties around your head and jogging through the Mojave desert in a pokemon suit, I happen to be the kind of guy who chooses (a). Although, add choice (c) — sit through 22, A Million just one more time in hopes of finally penetrating its transcendental nature — and choice (b) begins to look a bit more promising. I suppose it's only natural that the thumbs down verdict here not be subject to any further appeal.

Bon Iver: Bon Iver, Bon Iver

BON IVER: BON IVER, BON IVER (2011)

1) Perth; 2) Minnesota, WI; 3) Holocene; 4) Towers; 5) Michicant; 6) Hinnom, TX; 7) Wash.; 8) Calgary; 9) Lisbon, OH; 10) Beth / Rest.

No fewer than seven different musicians accompany Justin Vernon on his sophomore stab at a masterpiece, which should prompt the obvious question: «How the heck did all these people fit within one log cabin in the woods of Wisconsin? Must have been really crammed out there!» Then you learn that the album was not recorded in a log cabin at all, but in an abandoned veteri­narian clinic in Fall Creek, remodeled as a recording studio. Still sounds romantic, although one would expect it to be somehow reflected in the recording — a couple of songs about being kind to animals wouldn't hurt, and yet I can find no traces. Of course, with Bon Iver's lyrics never ma­king figurative sense, let alone literal, you can never be sure.

The move from acoustic minimalism to denser art-pop arrangements paid off brilliantly: most re­viewers were happy beyond measure, since they could amply concentrate on discussing the Im­portant Artistic Reasons behind the move, and praise the Important Artist for Progressive Artistic Growth, shown so early on in his career. A few disgruntled voices complained that the growth was actually Regressive, and picketed April Base Studios with signs reading JUDAS and BACK TO THE LOG CABIN and EMMA IS NOT HAPPY. (In their imaginations, at least). But even those voices generally acknowledged that the songs were still great, it's just the idea of develo­ping a bigger sound for them that didn't quite work out.

In fact, the atmosphere on Bon Iver, Bon Iver did not change a whole lot from the minimalistic soundscapes of For Emma. The basic vibes, moods, goals, structures remain exactly the same. The falsetto singing has no plans of going anywhere (although, for honesty's sake, Vernon shows a little more range this time around); nor do the lyrics show any signs of advancing from sheer nonsense to, at the very least, some plain old surrealism.

We got to give some credit to the Artist. Like so many of them, he is struggling to build himself his own personal dream world, since none of the others seem to be satisfactory enough. This dream world bears a passing resemblance to the United States of America, because it is also di­vided into states, and its towns and cities sometimes even have the same names as the correspon­ding US locations (ʽLisbon, OHʼ), although some of the locations are quite confusing (ʽMinne­sota, WIʼ?) and others could even be offensive to certain Americans (ʽHinnom, TXʼ — you Te­xans do realize that ʽHinnomʼ has the same root as Gehenna, right?).

In this dream world, people mostly talk in disjointed, impressionistic associations; play slow, soft, traditionally melodic music; sing in sweet voices, usually multi-tracking them along the way; and always exude a mixed happy-sad feeling because, after all, there are very few things in life over which one couldn't or shouldn't get happy and sad at the same time. If, every once in a while, you start getting the feeling that it all sounds discomfortingly close to banal 1980s-style adult contem­porary, just shake it off. According to a Pitchforkmedia reviewer, it was a brave move on Justin Vernon's side to move things so close to 1980s adult contemporary, and who are we to argue with that? 1980s artists recorded crappy music without understanding how crappy it was (and how much more crappy it would sound with each passing year); recording crappy music with such an understanding is definitely a far braver move.

It is true that bringing in extra people at least helped to make some of these songs acquire extra dynamics. ʽPerthʼ, for instance, gradually expands from a pretty guitar flourish to bombastic mar­tial drum patterns and then into a veritable sea of sound with synthesizers, horns, and shrill elec­tric lead lines that is quite far removed from log cabin isolationism — and yet, at the same time, does not really create any different type of mood. It could have been a fantastic track if the flou­rish in question worked in a trance-inducing manner, and the drum patterns and the wall of sound were gelling with it in some sort of meaningful way. To my ears, they don't: the guitar pattern is boring (and, after a while, quite annoyingly boring), the martial drums make no sense, and the wall of sound is neither structured well enough to punctuate the senses, nor dares to whip its brief traces of aggressive atonality into something genuinely alive — for fear that some people might dare to suppose a «rocking» strain to this very, very, very peaceful experience, I guess.

I could write a similar diatribe against just about every song on the album, which all range from staggeringly boring (ʽMichicantʼ is a straightahead criminal offense against the slide guitar) to mildly passable (ʽTowersʼ has a cozy country-pop drive, and the strings that double the slide gui­tars are an inventive touch) to almost good (the first half of ʽMinnesotaʼ, with its active fuzz bass lines, is the album's only «gutsy» moment). But what's the use? Just like For Emma, Bon Iver will work for you if you can feel it for this guy, or, more precise, if this guy makes you feel it for him. I feel nothing. All the ingredients are there, but they are all inserted in the wrong order, in wrong amounts, in the wrong handling.

When they get around to closing the album, the desire to strangle the producer becomes almost unbearable: as much as I try to, I just cannot interpret ʽBeth / Restʼ, with its electronic drums and keyboards, as a «brave» decision on the songwriter's part — I can only interpret it as a subconsci­ous tribute to one of the miriads of tepid ballads he must have been hearing on the radio when he was six or seven years old. Please do not count me in on this game; I refuse to accept these rules that allow «The Artist» to pass off bland Eighties nostalgia as «Modern Art». It is not a sin to be infected with any sort of influence, even Kim Wilde — it is a sin to extol the very fact of your be­ing influenced as your artistic statement. And no, masking that influence with sets of schizopha­sic lyrics that could just as well be machine-produced does not help.

I do not think that Bon Iver, Bon Iver is any «better» or «worse» than For Emma. Technically, it has a different sound, but substantially, nothing has changed. Except for my suspicion that the existence and appraisal of Bon Iver confirms that, on an official level, «indie» has become as much of a rotting corpse as everything else, and that the wheel has completed its next cycle — the so-called «independent musical press» has advanced to approximately the same level of credibi­lity as Rolling Stone. Yep, just my humble personal opinion, nothing else. And a heartfelt thumbs down — the most sincerely emotional outburst from me that could be associated with this record.

Check "Bon Iver, Bon Iver" (CD) on Amazon
Check "Bon Iver, Bon Iver" (MP3) on Amazon

Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago

BON IVER: FOR EMMA, FOREVER AGO (2007)

1) Flume; 2) Lump Sum; 3) Skinny Love; 4) The Wolves (Act I & II); 5) Blindsided; 6) Creature Fear; 7) Team; 8) For Emma; 9) re: Stacks.

For a brief while, Bon Iver (a graphic misrepresentation of French bon hiver ʽgood winterʼ, so make sure you get your French accent on the right syllable) seemed to be one of the hottest things happening on the indie scene. It was, in fact, like a proverbial indie fairy tale come true: a «visi­onary», mildly autistic, highly sensitive guy (Justin Vernon, a twenty-six year old major in Reli­gious Studies from Wisconsin), suffering from mononucleosis and girlfriend problems, secluding himself in a winter cabin, completely alone with his guitar and some recording equipment —and out comes a minimalistic masterpiece of lonely, melancholic beauty. This is the stuff NY Times bestsellers are made of.

What really surprised me about this album, upon studying people's reactions, was the rather large amount of «on-the-fence» reviews, along the lines of «fairly nice listen, okay and all that, but cer­tainly not deserving of the hype» and so on. Because For Emma, Forever Ago is certainly not your «average» indie record — it is one of those albums that should be driving people into op­posite tren­ches, machine-guns at the ready. It may be tempting for the evaluator to try and rise above the disagreements, but as tempting as it is, it simply makes no sense. I honestly do not see a way to call Justin Vernon's offering anything other than «genius» or «crap». And in between the two — sorry Bon Iver fans — I can only choose the latter.

Note: At this point, every bona fide Bon Iver fan is supposed to say «You just don't get it, do you?» and click the «Back» button on the browser. You have been warned: leave now, be­fore somebody gets hurt.

First and foremost: I am sick to my stomach of young bearded melancholic Artists locking them­selves up in log cabins with acoustic guitars. At the very least, one thing which all that time spent inside the log cabin could be devoted to, would be to fuckin' learn to play that acoustic guitar. If Nick Drake's Pink Moon ever had the right to be called a minimalistic masterpiece (which I am not sure of, but in any case, Pink Moon is fifty times the masterpiece For Emma could ever claim to be), it was because the minimalistic guitar parts were produced by a master guitar player, a genuine demi-god of the instrument. Justin Vernon, in comparison, does not seem to know one thing on the guitar that a bright school kid, listening to old folk records, could not master within one month of picking up the thing.

Second: The proverbially gorgeous falsetto simply does not cut it any more. Unless this is the first falsetto you have heard in your life, the sweet, soothing, lulling sound of Justin Vernon's voice adds nothing whatsoever to the legions of falsetto-using singers already assembled. The on­ly thing of note is the consistency: unlike such wimps as Brian Wilson, Prince, or even Antony Hegarty, Vernon sings almost exclusively in falsetto, threatening the very reputation of the entire State of Wisconsin. A brave chore (unless he also talks like that), but a head-splitting one.

Third and most important. I am not the one to deny the power and importance of atmosphere. I am certainly not against minimalism as such. And I certainly do not agree with Zappa on the ge­ne­ral principle that «broken hearts are for assholes». But there are limits to every sort of patience and tolerance, and as far as I am concerned, For Emma crosses that line quite definitively. The broken heart of Justin Vernon is probably the 10,000th broken heart or so that I have come across in my relations with various kinds of art. Just because it took a log cabin in Wisconsin and an all-out falsetto delivery to acquaint me with it, is not going to make me any more excited. Where is the goddamn music to go along with the broken heart?

Admittedly, from time to time there are a few vocal hooks that might, even should be salvaged from the realm of boredom (and if I ever notice someone appropriating them for a better record without sharing the proper credit, I promise to pretend not to have noticed). Most of them are tucked somewhere within the two slightly more upbeat tunes — ʽFlumeʼ and the title track; I also admit to liking the chorus of ʽCreature Fearʼ. The former two have bits of folksy beauty, the lat­ter has a bit of dream-pop charm... somehow, on these three, Vernon must have accidentally fallen upon a few non-standard, evocative vocal moves.

But all of these are exceptions, and they never obstruct too much the overall flow of the record, which is quite comparable with the average flow of a water storage basin on a very slightly bree­zy day. Sometimes it outdoes itself by dragging at an absolute tortoise pace (ʽThe Wolvesʼ), as we are supposed to revel in the naked pain and beauty of Vernon's voice and its multiple over­dubs. More often, it picks the tempo up just a little bit, usually on the strength of some basic folk shuffle strumming. Not that there is any big difference.

As for Justin Vernon's personal drama... you know what? I'm sorry about the guy as I may be sorry for every other guy or girl that suffers more than he or she deserves to, but I find his poetry clumsy and derivative (here is a typical example: "Only love is all maroon / Gluey feathers on a flume / Sky is womb and she's the moon / I am my mother on the wall, with us all / I move in water, shore to shore / No­thing's more"); his attempts to artistically individualize his problems at the same time overblown to the skies and undercooked to the core; and, of course, all the general indie-trendy hoopla fuss raised about the record reflecting the general crisis of the times.

In the end, I have no choice but to agree with Robert Christgau, the lone voice in the crowd to give the album its deserved C+ — or with my old idol Mark Prindle, who dismissed Bon Iver in his usually laconic way: «without the falsetto, it'd just be boring; with the falsetto, it's unlisten­able». Count this whole review as a somewhat superfluous commentary on that judgement. And please, please, PRETTY PLEASE, NO MORE BEARDED LONERS WITH ACOUSTIC GUI­TARS! WHERE THE FUCK IS A ROCK'N'ROLL GUSTAV MAHLER WHEN YOU NEED ONE? THUMBS DOWN, DOWN, DOWN!