Review: Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago, 2008, (Jagjaguwar (US/CAN) | 4AD (UK/EU) | Rouge (AUS)).

Bon Iver (Justin Vernon) wrote this album alone in a log cabin in Wisconsin (only some additional drums and horns were added in the studio in North Carolina), living off deer meat and the ‘leftovers’ his father would bring him sporadically. This anecdotal information is important on two counts; firstly it creates the perfect imaginary landscape in which to listen to this album, and secondly it marks Vernon as a man who wears his flannel plaid shirts for reasons other than fashion. For this reason, his music does not irritate me in the way that most other artists writing in the heartbroken man-and-his-guitar-alone-in-the-world field tend too. This is a man who shoots his own food for Christ’s sake, and as such the emotion of For Emma, Forever Ago carries more clout than the whining of yet another consumptive looking dickhead in an American Apparel tee-shirt.

For Emma is beautiful, in a word. Vernon took himself off to the woods after the painful dissolution of his band, DeYarmond Edison (I’m not going to feign any knowledge on that one) and the album also seems to address a lost love (though Vernon is reluctant to state definitively if the name Emma is real or representational). The songs range from relatively pared down tracks like ‘Flume’, which revolve mainly around Vernon’s voice and guitar (the original Log Cabin Elements, as it were), to tracks like ‘For Emma’ in which both the instrument count and the layering of vocals are upped considerably, creating a much broader but still intimate effect. ‘Skinny Love’ is, in my opinion, the best track on the album. It’s the kind of song that makes you want to go through some heart-wrenching, soul destroying break-up just so you can justify putting in on a loop, getting into bed, and whimpering along to its aching beauty for the next month or so. Some songs are less brilliant (‘Blindsided’, perhaps) but they’re still pretty darned good. Vernon’s voice is both fairly high-pitched and emotionally charged, two factors that I acknowledge usually send, justifiably, any right thinking listener running for door, pausing only to howl ‘Get over her, asshole!’, but he makes it work. Maybe it’s the aforementioned real hunter man thing he’s got going on. Ultimately I’m left hopelessly moved, wondering if he’s moved on enough to see other people, or at least let me wash the blood off his plaid for him. Failing this, I’ll apparently be able to catch him at Tripod on the 7th of October.

Megan Whittington enjoys drinking White Russians and discussing the relative merits of The Killers and William Faulker, though none of this should be encouraged.
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