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“I can hear, I can hear crying,” Justin Vernon repeats, louder and louder, as music rises around him: drums, guitars and horns along with voices mixed to sound near and far. It’s a track called “Naeem” that arrives at the midpoint of “i,i,” the fourth album Vernon has made as Bon Iver, and like most of his songs it’s a bundle of disparate emotions and connotations.
The music starts as something like a hymn, with stolid major-key piano chords, then hurtles ahead with galloping drums and pealing guitar chords. The assembled musicians and voices create the studio illusion of a growing communal movement, though at the end it dissolves down to some sort of mechanical whir. Vernon’s voice is a rough shout, like an urgent call to action, but beyond the refrain, the lyrics are cryptic and diffuse: “Tell them I’ll be passing on/tell them we’re young mastodons.” It’s the kind of Rorschach-blot song that Bon Iver has perfected: brimming with feelings that can gust in any direction and that won’t be pinned down.
Despite its title, “i,i” is Bon Iver’s most collaborative album. Vernon began Bon Iver in solitude: alone with his guitars, his voice and his multitrack recording program, holed up in a hunting-lodge cabin in the winter, recording the 2008 album “For Emma, Forever Ago.” That album established Bon Iver’s reputation but not its methods. Ever since, Vernon has been cultivating musical connections, most famously with Kanye West, with whom he has recorded and performed, and from whom he may have absorbed the approach of producing music by nurturing, choosing, combining and building on ideas from an ever-shifting assortment of colleagues.
Vernon has filled the years between Bon Iver albums by recording with others, running his own the Eaux Claires festival that he created in Wisconsin, and working (particularly in Berlin) with an amorphous, expanding artistic collective that was initially called PEOPLE and then restyled — look at it upside-down — as 37d03d. None of the songs on “i,i” is credited to Vernon alone.
In a way, “i,i” pulls Bon Iver back from the brink. Bon Iver’s previous album, “22, a Million” from 2016, was even more enigmatic, with typographically challenging alphanumeric song titles for tracks built on deliberately fractured and attenuated structures. Its interruptions and juxtapositions often set an abstract electronic realm against the physical one of voices and instruments — mirroring, perhaps, the way the internet now intrudes on everyday consciousness, even when we’re not looking at a screen.
The new album is just as chameleonic, but not as jarring; its rival forces have learned to cooperate. The album’s watchwords might be found in “Salem”: “What I think we need is elasticity, empowerment and ease,” Vernon sings. In the new songs, hissing, blipping, whooshing electronic sounds dovetail with Vernon’s vocal harmonies, floating guitar lines, chamber-music string arrangements and jazzy horns.
Vernon has spoken about developing a song from an “environment” — an electronic texture — the way he once built on guitar chords, and many of the songs on “i,i” materialize amid clouds of noise. Its brief opening track, “Yi,” and the full-length song that follows it, “iMi,” grew out of a snippet of found sound that Vernon couldn’t stop toying with. As chords and melodies surface, the noise often finds its way into the rhythm section.
There are nuggets of intelligibility in most songs. “I like you, I like you/And that ain’t nothing new,” Vernon sings in “iMi,” while “Faith” muses on spirituality and loyalty as guitars swell and angelic voices hover. In “Jelmore,” amid a thicket of flutelike tones, Vernon seems to glance at extinction and global warming: “One by one by one we’ll all be gone,” he sings, and, later, “How long will you disregard the heat?”
In “U (Man Like)”—which is grounded in the Copland-esque piano chords of Bruce Hornsby, one of its writers — Vernon, Hornsby, Moses Sumney and Jenn Wasner share admonitions for the MeToo era: “Man, improve.” And the album’s final song, “RABi,” counters fear of death with the fleeting pleasures of life. “Sunlight feels good now don’t it,” Vernon sings amid tinkling percussion and swaying-hammock syncopations, “I don’t have a leaving plan.”
Each song on “i,i” is an intricate, labyrinthine, multilayered construction. But the marvel of Bon Iver is how fragile and conditional each song seems; not monumental but precarious and permeable, susceptible to chance or whim or fate. All the planning creates music that feels as impermanent, and illuminating, as a sunbeam.
Bon Iver
“i,i”
(Jagjaguwar)
