Bon Iver : SABLE,
There has been a long discussion in the Treble work channels: me, the defender of Bon Iver, moved to tears by that soaring and abstracted country folk, obscured behind waves of indie appeal, soft rock songcraft underpinning cunning arrangements, and then Jeff, our fearless leader, formerly ambivalent turned hater, annoyed beyond reason by the witch-house adjacent naming schemes and avant-gesturing elements of Bon Iver’s work that, to be fair, rarely felt fully seized upon. It is one of many of our microtensions, the kind that create fruitful work and a healthy organic dynamic rather than mere parroting of each other’s words. I was moved by the single “S P E Y S I D E” and figured, hey, I’m the one on staff to parse this stuff, so let’s go.
I was anticipating, to be truthful, something better. Firstly: I am not opposed, as some are, to instrumental intro tracks. Tone setting is important, especially if you view records as longer form works, closer to novels or films. They’re even a canny and useful way to establish a mindset for the audience to properly be primed for the kind of work to come, with moments such as Close to the Edge’s opening of birdsong and water priming a new age-adjacent kind of starry eyed view for the coming progressive rock/country rock hybrid of peak Yes. However, 12 seconds of a continuous tone feels… superfluous? Especially on a mere 12-minute EP. It segues seamless into the first proper track, the only front-to-back good song on this brief collection, but it raises the question of why it isn’t just the opening of that song proper. This kind of indecisiveness of form would, in better cases, be able to be ignored without remark, but here belies immediately deeper issues that reveal themselves.
“THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS” is, as stated before, the only front-to-back good song on this collection. The playing skews more celestial on its country-folk approach, sitting in that similar glimmering place that the self-titled album hovered in, halfway between the gleam and glitter of prog while still being girded by those strong country-folk melodies and arrangements. The vocal approach here is interesting, cutting the electronic effects that have been the fundament of this project since its inception to go back to Justin Vernon’s natural baritone voice, sung in a way he hasn’t really since his solo work under his own name preceding Bon Iver’s founding. Even the lyrics here, consistently the weakest point of Bon Iver material, is strong, marrying a Wittgenstein-Derrida-Sartre circuit of existential and semiotic nausea to the sublimity of being. It’s a good song.
Which makes “S P E Y S I D E,” interesting as a single, feel frustrating in context. Immediately, the cleverness and thoughtfulness steps back, trading it for the same kind of cheap melodicism that the indie boom at its worst (early 2000s to early 2010s) was guilty of. It’s pleasant, mind you, but following such a strong opening track, it places the EP, with only one song to go, on wobbly footing. These kinds of shorter form releases seem perhaps to an outside as lower-risk forms but the opposite is true; there are things you can do with greater real estate that undercut risk, with the accepted wisdom being that you don’t go to double-records on up to box sets of new material with a mind to love every track abstracted from the whole. An EP of this length, roughly the same as one decent prog tune, needs a consistency already at risk.
Which makes album closer “AWARD SEASON” so unbelievably frustrating. It opens with an a cappella, framed in a manner my roommate described unflatteringly as “youth pastor-like”… and then stays there, on that approach, for well over a minute, no variation. This would be acceptable if the vocal was perhaps more charismatic, but it isn’t. This might be salvageable or even charming if the lyricism was strong. However, the opening line is: “I can handle / more than I can handle / so I turn the handle.” Typically, I side-step lyrical analysis in music criticism. Most music I listen to and most of the critical approach I take doesn’t need that strict textually. However, when you suspend me in a void with nothing BUT the unaffected vocal and then give me that… Well. Suddenly, from nothing, a swelling comes: strings, saxophone, keys, this rich and sumptuous instrumental bed. The song is turning, you might think, this was a feint to establish a mini-epic, one of those clever turns of arrangement where a piece slowly assembles itself before you. But then the instrumental bed fades, the vocal returns, a glance at the runtime shows it only has maybe a minute left, and the instrumental never returns. Why? What a puzzling and disappointing arrangement choice.
Which mirrors, of course, the befuddling opening, with its false start and lack of commitment to the arrangement of those first real moments of music. As a whole, this is especially frustrating: early in the pandemic, Bon Iver started releasing singles under the rubric Bon Iver Season 5, implying a slowly accumulating fifth record built out of these micro releases. The two songs that came were great, solidifying the experiments of 22, A Million and i,i into something closer to the sharp songcraft of Blood Bank and the self-titled. Then, a long silence, punctuated only by… this. To describe it as a disappointment in a way isn’t enough. Perhaps he hadn’t released more because the well dried up. Maybe it would have been better if he stayed silent. The first real song on this release is still worthwhile, a great addition to his catalog. The rest, sadly, validates my editor’s long-held position, refuting my own.
Label: Jagjaguwar
Year: 2024
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