Bon Iver is liberated from the labyrinth of electronics clouds and effects, and now hugs the lust

Sounds that seem to stick to the skin, sucking echoes and a singing voice that wriggles like a caress. In ‘Short Story’ we hear gospel -like voices calling: « And the strain and thirst are sweet. « 

Is the unification with God here or is it the carefully fusion? From what desire, singer musician Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, made his new album Sable, Fable?

The answer is surprisingly simple. The inscrutable singer from Wisconsin who has been hiding behind a full beard for a career for a career and his falset voice is drivling in piercing sound effects, has a new motto: no longer ‘be invisible’ but ‘Only got so much time to live. Let’s be sexy. ‘ From that idea, Vernon (43) started his fifth album about four years ago.

Unlike the previous plates, 22, A Million (2016) and i, i (2019), when he let keyboards, guitar and ragged echoes collide hard, there is now the slope of sensual vocals that unites with a pedal steel guitar or a lusty sax. On Sable, Fable A warm -blooded atmosphere arises thanks to a gurgling organ and dancing drums, while Vernon reports his lust and love cheerfully.

That frankness about feelings does not mean that he has returned to the acoustic style of his debut For Emma, ​​Forever AGOfrom 2008. Even now, Vernon packed the sensuality in a layer of experiment. He makes acoustic instruments shine and then throws a blanket of spiky effects over it. Within a song he swings from country-like guitars to bombastic electronics clouds, pleasantly driven by a galloping rhythm. In ‘Everything is Peaceful Love’, for example, the vocal parties are euphoric, in ‘Walk Home’ they sound squeezed, and becomes the erotic message ( »Pull Me Close Up To Your Face/ Honey, I Just Want The TasteThen brought again with a distorted, Kobold-like voice.

Back in his shell

For Emma, ​​Forever AGO Was the album that Vernon suddenly made an internationally popular musician thanks to the single ‘Skinny Love’. The singer who hoped to be able to perform every weekend in a different pub in Wisconsin suddenly had to go on the world non-stop.

After the honest content of the songs on the debut, about his broken heart, Vernon crawled into his shell. He turned out, he discovered, as a human being against the star existence, with his long series of performances in sports halls and the interference of strangers.

He felt hunted and exhausted, he recently told On The New York Timesas if a boot was permanently printed on his chest. That boot, and the meeting with Kanye West, was perhaps the reason that his approach after For Emma … and and the following Bon Iver, Bon Iver (2011) changed. He worked with West several times, their best -known song is ‘Lost in the world’ in West’s experimental hip -hop album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010), that would be a milestone in his career.

The song was the beginning of Vernon’s new, claustrophobic sounding music style. The unadorned sound of yesteryear was replaced by unruly instruments, colored by his adventurous production technique. With the help of granular synthesis, he was able to divide sounds into small pieces and put it in new orders. With sampling, unusual microphone arrangements and auto-tune, he disguised and decorated his instruments-and sometimes lost in the possibilities that today’s technology offered him.

And the listener lost with him. Also in the lyrics, which were often abstract and incomprehensible, with ineffable titles such as ’22 (about Soon) ‘and’ ’10 Deathbreast ‘(from the album 22, A Million from 2016).

He found the best protection against the outside world in digital disguise: his beautiful falset voice hardly sounded like that of Justin Vernon: we heard a thick layer stacked voting frame, edited with effects such as ‘pitch shifting’.

But that’s different now. His voice seems freed from the labyrinth. That singing voice, which once transformed from Briesend into a grunge band (pre-Emma), according to vulnerable falset voice, to ragged Android, is now full again: shaky, sensual, strict or syrupy as honey. Sometimes, for example in the sober ‘Awards Season’, even A Capella and without reverb.

The transformation is not only a gift for the listener, it is also a sign of his recovery. Vernon has now shaken off his debilitating fatigue and stayed in a rehab clinic to conquer his cigarette addiction. He moved from Koud Wisconsin to Warm Los Angeles, where he can get incognito on the street and basketball every day with people who only know him as « that guest Justin ». As he says: he loves himself again.

This album is an expression of that, according to him. It is his most personal album, « because I mainly made it for myself. »

Vernon, who has lent his voice in recent years to songs of pop stars such as Charli XCX and Taylor Swift, in turn invited artists such as Danielle Haim (from Haim), Jacob Collier and guitarist Michael Gordon, aka Mk.gee, who all fit into the swinging, vital style of Sable, Fable.

Even his texts are now surprisingly direct: « Keep the sad shit off the phone/ and get your fine ass on the road!(« I’ll be there »), and introspective: « Nothing Really Happened Like I Thought It would« ( » Speyside « ). And if they are ambiguous, they are beautiful mysterious: »There are things behind things behind things« The boot is gone, Justin Vernon is back.

Bon Iver: Sable, Fable Receives Friday, April 11 at Konkurrent.

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