BON IVER For Emma, Forever
Ago (4AD)
Has
this album ever taken me the longest time to warm to it? With its Chris
McCandless-style backstory (after his band breaks up, Justin Vernon takes to
hibernating through the winter in a remote Wisconsin hunting cabin, where he
ends up recording much of this album) and alphabetical and musical proximity to
the work of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, shouldn’t it sound pretty much identical to
Eddie Vedder’s soundtrack for “Into The Wild”?
Well, maybe. It’s taken me
a year, but I’ve finally achieved a kind of grudging respect for this record,
especially when it operates on the more far-flung, uncharted edges of its sonic
template. There are moments here that are quite lovely: the reverberant choral
harmonies wrapped around “Lump Sum”; the whooping campfire jauntiness of “Skinny
Love”, somewhat at odds with its bloodied, salty lyrics; the accretion of
percussion that closes “The Wolves (Act I And II)”, sounding like ice cracking;
the way “Creature Fear” imperceptibly morphs into whistled, post-rock
almost-waltz “Team”. The best bits wait until last: “For Emma”, the closest the
record comes to a straight pop song, sounds like a tabletop diorama of one of
The Walker Brothers’ huge 1960s productions, a tiny cardboard “The Sun Ain’t
Gonna Shine Anymore”, perhaps, and almost as great is the cleansing and closure
of “Re: Stacks”, which reminds how this album plays with silence more
deliberately than anything I’ve heard since Mark Hollis’ eponymous solo debut.
It’s not a perfect album,
of course. Vernon’s lyrics are too personal or encoded to offer much succour to
anyone living outside his head, and vinyl buyers might find the album’s
generally praiseworthy sonics compromised by a sibilance-prone UK pressing. But
I’m genuinely surprised to find that “For Emma, Forever Ago” is strong enough to
make itself heard through the hype. Blimey, I’ll be enjoying Fleet Foxes at this
rate.