I’m in a club in a slow motion montage. There’s probably some sort of substance involved, maybe a couple pills or one shot too many. There was a breakup, a car crash, a flat heartbeat. Nothing too catastrophic, but enough to drag out the mourning for more than a few days. I’m swaying in the club, bouncing between heavily synthesized drum beats and an eerily smooth saxophone. There’s static in the background, a sort of broken up dizziness that makes you feel like you’re tripping even if you’re entirely sober.
This is Bon Iver’s new album. The long anticipated third album of alternative artist Justin Vernon comes after four years of waiting. While it pays homage to the old styles of the down in mouth Vernon, he’s changing things up in this album. Gone are my days of only listening to Bon Iver when stuck inside during a rainstorm. His new album doesn’t fit the languid, despondent mood I used to listen to him in. There’s something new happening.
Not only are his song titles more playful, with titles such as "__45__," "715 - CR∑∑KS" and "22 (OVER S∞∞N)," but the melodies are harsher, pulsing with a new life that his old songs seemed to just be lamenting over. There’s something in the songs that makes my heart beat rev in the same way it would if I heard a marathon running up behind me, a stampede of bulls, the beginning of a parade — something is coming. Something is coming now.
There are elements of the songs that ring true to the Bon Iver we’ve all grown to love. His voice is heavily obscured by production effects, leaving his often time falsetto voice skewed in an attractive, almost inhuman fashion. Like most of Vernon’s songs his voice is the center focus of the record. But his voice has changed its meaning since "For Emma, Forever Ago." This album feels like he’s moving on from something.
Staying at the Ace Hotel. If the calm would allow. Then I would just be floating to you now. It would make me pass to let it pass on. I’m climbing the dash, that skin. (Here in this room, this narrow room where life began when we were young last night).
There’s still heartbreak in his songs, but instead of asking people to stay, he’s now wondering why they didn’t. It’s a small shift, but coupled with the constant production of his voice and the newfound vigor in his melodies, the tone feels different.
His old songs are him learning how to fight with his own self in the midst of heartbreak. This my excavation and today is kumran. Everything that happens is from now on. This is pouring rain… This is paralyzed.
His new songs are him learning how to come back from them. Canonize… Fold the map and mend the gap and I tow the word companion and I make myself escape. Oh, the multitude of other. It comes always off the page.
Vernon has struck gold in his own work. This new sort of cosmic, ever shifting animation he has created through his music is bringing listeners out of the distilled world of heartbreak and solitude into a new, brighter space. Everything he’s talking about ties together: canonize, womb, moon water, Gnosis, highlands, canyons, bleeding vines. Rebirth. It’s a renewal. A rehab. The revitalization of a man left to pith and pulp.
I've cut the cloth… How to know who to write. How to know who can cull up all the questions. (We know that I'm right, cease). To clean out a night I fell in love.
