Bon Iver
Blood Bank
Jagjaguwar
By Mike Randall
Justin Vernon probably didn’t expect to be where he is today. Any rustic seclusion he once enjoyed has likely been limited, as his days are spent in places like Sydney and Paris, performing to fans he collectively and gently leveled with last year’s For Emma, Forever Ago. The dejected feelings that were such an essential part of making that record have softened, but the air he breathed, the smoke from the fireplace remains engrained.
The story of Bon Iver sometimes unfairly nudges Vernon out of the spotlight. Recorded in the solitude of the cold Wisconsin woods as snow fell and Vernon’s broken heart crawled to mend itself, the process and the scenario are too often credited as his catalyst. It’s almost as if some think the man himself wasn’t even there or that the songs were discovered in a dusty chest in the corner of the room.
But a lot has changed since that winter he tucked himself away to pen a record as introspective and full of tangibility as Midwestern winters are long. Whereas he was personally handing out copies of For Emma until a label finally picked it up, Bon Iver now has an audience clamoring to get their hands on a diminutive four-song EP. Few artists attain the level of devotion that warrants interest in an EP, especially one containing songs upwards of three years old (these tracks were recorded intermittently from 2006-2009).
Perhaps the reasoning is that people want to see what Vernon is capable of, that For Emma wasn’t a gift from a cabin or a deflated ticker. They hope they can rediscover the icy air that emits from his falsetto and the hushed overtones that deliver a silence so deafening it makes the hair on your arms straighten. They want to analyze if a track Vernon penned in 2006 has the same emotional intensity and rustic grace as one written after For Emma landed on everyone’s critical list. Good news – Blood Bank delivers much of the same, and he isn’t set in his ways to do it.
“Blood Bank” starts things off with a sharper edge than anything on For Emma, but make no mistake about it – it, and everything on Blood Bank are every bit as wintry. Vernon strums a biting electric guitar as vocal harmonies envelop him like falling snow and a hovering, restrained electricity builds and builds and until it’s released at the very end. His falsetto returns during “Beach Baby,” a track that recalls the cold even though it’s about a summer love. With strummed folk backed by piercing pedal steel and contemplative lines like, “When you're out/Tell your lucky one to know that you'll leave/But you don't lock when you're fleeing/I'd like not hear keys,” it’s a not-so-distant cousin to For Emma’s “Flume.” A summer theme is revisited during the piano-laden “Babys,” but Vernon’s voice remains cerebral and full of isolated tension, blowing like a chilly breeze. He takes a risk with “Woods,” constructing a vocal kaleidoscope that begins with distortion a little too close to “California Love.” Whereas “Woods” initially sounds like the tinkering of someone suffering from boredom, it gets more interesting as it builds and takes on an almost Pet Sounds quality as Vernon’s a cappella dizzyingly cascades likely biographical lines: “I'm up in the woods/I'm down on my mind/I’m building a still to slow down the time.”
Yes, Blood Bank is far too short at only four songs and under 20 minutes, but Vernon is the kind of artist you take what you can get because it’s now even more clear Bon Iver packs more into a single track than a full album from most musicians. He leaves you wanting more, and that would be truthful even in a recapitulation of a full record. Justin Vernon might not need the winter as a muse, but many of us need Justin Vernon to get us through the winter.
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