Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago
Review of Indie Folk Singer Iver's New CD with 'Flume' Single
Apr 13, 2006
It's a rare and difficult task to create music that is both sonically skeletal and ornately rich with emotion, but that is exactly what indie/folk troubadour Bon Iver (real name: Justin Vernon) has done with For Emma, Forever Ago. It is the rare album that grabs the listener by the jugular and doesn't let go for a second.
"Flume" opens the disc with the basic template: quiet, palm-muted acoustic guitars, minimal ambient sounds, and the real bread 'n butter: the transcendent double-tracked vocal harmonies which touch on everyone from TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe to Amos Lee to Marvin Gaye and span from bass-y grumbles to angelic falsetto. Justin Vernon is white, by the way. But he has enough soul in his lungs to power a city worth of heartache.
For Emma
"Lump Sum" achieves lift-off with a breathtaking choir of reverbed Vernons vocalizing amidst a pulsating bass drum and acoustic guitar strums . For lyrical directness, look some place else--choruses such as, "Fit it all; fit it in the doldrums, or so the story goes/Color the era; film, it's historical" won't get anyone high on their own merits; they need Vernon's haunting tenor to sell them.
On the first "act" of "The Wolves," Vernon sounds so haunted by a past memory, he can barely bring himself to the microphone. But he does. And it's magical. The sparse, presumably open-tuned acoustic guitars are strummed modestly, leaving spacious gaps of meditative silence.
"Act II" is when the levee breaks: layers upon layers of Vernons harmonize on the gentle mantra "What might have been lost/ Don't bother me." A backing vocal utilizes an auto-tuner to wonderful effect, a lone machine among men. By the track's end, Vernon is too overcome with emotion to even bother with lyrics; his haunting, wordless cries say more than a Conor Oberst Trapper Keeper ever could.
The Production Style of For Emma Forever Ago
The introduction of more involved instrumentation helps keep the album's second half from settling into stark-overload. "For Emma" is peppered with light horn touches, and "Creature Fear" (along with the short instrumental reprise "Team") is almost shocking with its fluid bassline and tempo change at the chorus.
For Emma, Forever Ago is the kind of album myths are built on. It is the sound of falling in love and having a heart broken at the same time. Following it with a better set of songs will prove difficult, and expecting more than this fantastic debut is almost ridiculous.. Really, even though the first steps on the moon are certainly the most awe-inspiring, does that make the ones that followed less significant?
