When no other song will do: Bon Iver - The Wolves (Act i & ii)
“When your eyes are all painted Sinatra Blue”
This line represents why Justin Vernon stands high above the sea of acoustic indie out there.
There are so many pitches intertwined in this one line it’s hard to hear the exact notes; but at the same time there’s nothing to listen to bar Vernon’s one-man blues choir and the guitar’s drone chord. The result is harrowing, and stunning.
I’m still not 100% sure whether For Emma, Forever Ago is as good as I think it is. I’ve had friends put on to it who find it ‘samey’, ‘boring’ etc…but every winter this album comes back into my life and threatens never to leave.
After Bon Iver won the Grammy for best new band someone on twitter put something along the lines of “it’s the soundtrack to masturbation and crying”; they’re not that wrong. Desolation is what comes accross most in the album; the production, the emotion from the lyrics, but not from their message (they’re just pretty, a lot of the time they make little to no sense).
It’s a really good album. And although his second LP is almost as good as it could’ve been, For Emma Forever Ago is a little bit special.
