Bon Iver

DeYarmond Edison was a roots-rock band hailing from Wisconsin. When they settled in North Carolina, Justin Vernon decided to return to Wisconsin and launch his solo project, Bon Iver.

The stark, skeletal For Emma Forever Ago (Jagjaguwar, 2008) presented a melancholic singer-songwriter in the vein of Iron And Wine. Vernon is fluent in a versatile falsetto register, best demonstrated in the singalong Flume. But his real asset is the way a song is constructed and unwound. The counterpoint to the vocals in Lump Sum are a monk-like choir and a pseudo-Brazilian pattern that the guitar repeats over and over again. The effect in the pseudo-blues shout of Skinny Love is that the strumming is even plainer, but in reality it's a duet of guitar and banjo that maintains the apparent equilibrium. The dreamy art of The Wolves (Act I and II) is mostly vocal polyphony, merging gospel, doo-wop and West-Coast folk-rock. The pure ethereal atmosphere of Blindsided relies as much on double falsetto dialogue as on colorful if subdued guitar knitting. After a hummed overture, Creature Fear toys with mood shifts, alternating whispered to shouted parts, For Emma is, instead, wildly different in nature: a lively and romantic tune that actually boasts an arrangement of horns and twangy guitar (and a long instrumental break). The closer is also the longest piece, Re: Stacks, a calm dreamy meditation with none of the subtlety of the previous songs, but, on the other hand, a lot of tenderness.

The EP Blood Bank (Jagjaguwar, 2009) contains 4 tracks of material recorded between 2006 and 2008, notably the hypnotic Babys (based on loud piano strumming), the psychedelic chant Woods (worthy of David Crosby's If I Could Only Remember my Name), and the poignant if plain single Blood Bank, that basically follows in the footsteps of the album's last song, Re: Stacks.

Bon Iver's Justin Vernon and Wisconsin's instrumental combo Collections of Colonies of Bees formed Volcano Choir and released the brainy and gloriously deranged Unmap (Jagjaguwar, 2009). This time Bon Iver sang in an ecstatic, stoned, dreamy register that evoked David Crosby's If I Could Only Remember My Name. The band accompanied him with discrete acoustic touches. Some songs are little more than abstract mood-sculpting for acoustic guitar and ghostly voices (Husks And Shells) That psychedelic element meets post-rock and minimalist repetition in the seven-minute Seeplymouth, reminiscent of Laurie Anderson before it turns into a tribal orgy. The other seven-minute piece, Still, is an agonizing remix of Woods. Dote is little more than an "om" released on top of a mountain in a distant land. There is more than just transfixed meditation for old hippies. Mbira In The Morass childishly deconstructs the format of the jazz ballad for cocktail lounges. Being a regular song, Island IS looks like an oddity here. The whole album feels like a ghostly experience, a brief detour into another dimension.

Volcano Choir also released Repave (2013).

Bon Iver (Jagjaguwar, 2011) was almost the exact opposite of the debut album: drenched in lush electroacoustic orchestration (including a string section arranged by Rob Moose and saxophonist Colin Stetson). Perth (falsetto soul music with martial drumming and chaotic bombast) signaled a complete change of direction. For better and for worse, Bon Iver indulged in Babelic confusion, best represented by Minnesota WI in which an ambient guitar melody reminiscent of Western movie soundtracks, funk-soul rhythm, lounge horns and bluegrass strumming coexist and alternate without any rational, narrative justification. It's like Van Morrison's Moon Dance but without the killer melodies. He often employs a strategy of progressive refinement: the country-rock tune Towers begins as a nebula of sound but with every sentence he adds an instrument, a riff, a vocal counterpoint, a sound effect. Other songs simply don't go anywhere and consist in floating around the vocals, as is the case for the orchestral dream Wash.
When Bon Iver sticks to a center of mass, like in the single Calgary, he sounds like a hard-rock version of Sting. Thanks to Doogie Howser's solemn piano notes, Beth/Rest evokes Chicago's grand ballads, except that Bon Iver lacks the grand hook to go with it and therefore opts for a pointless instrumental jam.
The brief and psychedelic Hinnom TX and the surreal glitchy instrumental Lisbon OH end up sounding more intriguing than the ambitious architectures of the louder songs. The introverted atmosphere of the debut album is partially reenacted in the fragile jazzy litany of Holocene and in the sleepy slocore cry of Michicant.
His falsetto is an acquired taste. It definitely lends an sense of vulnerability to the songs, but it also keeps them from sounding more adult. This over-produced album ends up showing the limitations of Bon Iver's skills as a composer and a songwriter. What is amazing is that songs that are arranged and structured in such wildly different manners end up sounding so similar and repetitive. Vernon helped Kanye West on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010) and Yeezus (2013), and learned something about electronic arrangements from him.

22 A Million (Jagjaguwar, 2016), his most impressive album yet, adopts an arrangement of glitch electronica, samples and, quite simply, noise. The vocals are mostly distorted, sometimes in a way that seems to ridicule them intentionally. It is also a cryptic treatise full of mathematical symbols and religious symbols, which can be interpreted as playful (the tenth track is titled 00000 Million which makes 1,000,000 if you put the 10 in front of its title) or sinister (33 is god and 666 is the cross). The album opens with the quasi-religious lament 22 Over Soon, that sounds like a demonic remix of a plantation song. 10 Death Breast blends together melodramatic distorted vocals, a tractor-like rhythm and a Jon Hassell-ian soundscape. The bluesy 45 pits against each other some call-of-response vocals, timid jazz saxophones, and (at the very end) mirroring banjos. 33 God duets with his own sped-up voice besides the pounding drums and alien keyboards. The protagonists of songs like 666 Cross are the cluttered electronica and shifting rhythm. The massive spacetime warping of 21 Moon Water recalls the musique concrete of the 1950s. Alas, when the vocals prevail, one can appreciate the mediocrity of the singer and the insignificance of the melodies, as in 8 Circle. The exception is the closer, 00000 Million, a plantive invocation in an exotic flavor over tired piano notes. Everything is out of place, out of context, out of mind.

i,i (Jagajuwar, 2019) completed an ideal four-season tetralogy for Bon Iver: For Emma Forever Ago was the bleak winter, Bon Iver Bon Iver was the jovial spring and 22 A Million was the turbulent summer, i,i meant a pensive autumn. No longer the stark folk crooner, Vernon was now the composer and conductor of an avantgarde collective. iMi, for example, feels like a collage composed by Vernon, James Blake, Wheezy, Chris Messina, Brad Cook, BJ Burton and Andrew Sarlo, and several vocalists: electronic surfs, gospel-y call-and-response, sparse hip-hop beats, jungle percussion... Most of the songs can be reduced to the same template: a pop-soul ballad disfigured by electronic effects. The nostalgic synth-folk Hey Ma is the designated standout, followed by the album's emotional zenith in Faith, but perhaps the real standouts are the songs in which the disorienting effects truly enhance the melody such as the falsetto ditty U (Man Like), with Bruce Hornsby's barbaric piano and a children's choir, and Sh'Diah, with a lengthy and dreamy sax solo that steals the show. The rousing fanfare of Salem is the cinematic moment of the album, while the hiphop-inflected We and the gospel-flavored Naeem (brilliantly disintegrated by a surreal gallop) show the reach of this eclectic team. But half of the songs are simply tedious. Perhaps this should have been a seven-song EP instead of full-length album. Bon Iver loses the match with Bruce Hornsby's contemporary Absolute Zero (2019), which sounds like a much more mature take on cybernetic pop.

The EP Sable (2024) was incorporated into the album Sable - Fable (2025). The EP includes the stripped-down Things Behind Things Behind Things and Speyside, which are worthy of the first album. The album, instead, co-written and co-produced with a bunch of songwriters and producers (notably Jim-E Stack and Asher Weisberg), veers toward bland, awkward electronic pop/neosoul with traces of gospel and country. It's hard to salvage any of its new songs (maybe Everything Is Peaceful Love).