{"id":41201,"date":"2008-11-03T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-03T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/for-emma-forever-ago\/"},"modified":"2008-11-03T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2008-11-03T00:00:00","slug":"for-emma-forever-ago","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/for-emma-forever-ago\/","title":{"rendered":"For Emma, Forever Ago"},"content":{"rendered":"

I tend to be pretty instinctive with my music; it\u2019s either love or, well, not so much love, and I can usually tell on first listen. Then came Bon Iver (alias for singer-songwriter Justin Vernon) to shake things up. On his debut as Bon Iver, Vernon — following the disbanding of his band DeYarmond Edison (who later reformed as Megafaun, without Vernon) — holed up in his father\u2019s cabin in northern Wisconsin to write and record the bulk of this disc. His isolation gives For Emma, Forever Ago<\/i> its wintry, ruminative intimacy, though Vernon\u2019s songs have a lovely sort of orchestral fullness that belies the usual image of an singer-songwriter toting an acoustic guitar (something which Vernon called in an interview with Pitchfork \u201cboring for the most part. The song actually needs 80-500 people singing or whatever the vibe is of that room, it needs that fight.\u201d<\/o:p><\/p>\n

It took me five or so spins to fall for this album, but when I did, I fell hard. It\u2019s one of those albums that struck some tender nerve with me, for whatever reason. It breaks your heart and mends it all at once; it\u2019s like a love letter that you can\u2019t bring yourself to shred, that culls up all those same memories each time you see it again. Bon Iver\u2019s sound is familiar, a little like Elliott Smith with more frills or Iron & Wine, though in some essential ways Vernon paves new ground that is wholly his own. There\u2019s his voice, for one, which rises from a stunning falsetto to a grittier, grainy timbre. Then there are the lyrics: vivid, syntactically so kooky, and hypnotically alliterative. Just incredible, really. Take opener \u201cFlume,\u201d with its wavering strings, close-mic\u2019ed guitar accompaniment, and the unsettling refrain \u201cOnly love is all maroon \/ Gluey feathers on a flume \/ Sky is womb and she\u2019s the moon.\u201d It\u2019s stripped-down and strangely pretty for its chilliness.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

\u201cLump Sum\u201d takes \u201cFlume\u201d\u2019s almost uncomfortable closeness and airs it out. Opening with a choir of multitracked Vernon\u2019s, he then adds in quick flicks of acoustic guitar, voice soaring on lines like \u201cIn my arbor \u2018til my ardor \/ Trumped every inner inertia\u201d and his final sentiment, \u201cWe will see when it gets warm,\u201d both of which seem to capture the mood of both isolation and tentative hope that colors this album. <\/o:p><\/p>\n

Then, of course, there\u2019s \u201cSkinny Love,\u201d the track with which I\u2019ve unwittingly pissed everyone off by playing on loop for the past week or so. On an album so uniformly excellent, it\u2019s tough to pick a standout, but this song would likely qualify. It\u2019s a striking, atmospheric encapsulation of love gone hopelessly wrong, not bitter exactly, just broken and drained. Vernon\u2019s vocals come like a pained sigh but reach richness by the end as he asks, \u201cWho will love you? Who will fight? Who will fall far behind?\u201d <\/o:p><\/p>\n

And from there, it\u2019s all good, too. \u201cBlindsided\u201d builds on a single repeated note and Vernon\u2019s muted vocals to a lush, buoyant chorus, while the propulsive \u201cCreature Fear\u201d is full of slow-burning belligerency, like its climactic sentiment, \u201cSo many foreign worlds \/ So relatively fucked \/ So ready for us.\u201dMeanwhile, \u201cFor Emma,\u201d with its shinier post-production horns, is the love parable the album has been building to, featuring a clear-eyed Vernon emerging from the other side of the relationship\u2019s agony, ending with the bittersweet \u201cI toured the light \/ So many foreign roads for Emma, forever ago.\u201d<\/o:p><\/p>\n

With all of Bon Iver\u2019s material, he makes it look so simple to craft terrifically complex, but more importantly, resonant songs that speak to heartbroken yet resilient humanity. For Emma, Forever Ago <\/i>is truly remarkable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":29605,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[8294],"rating":[5646],"class_list":["post-41201","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-bon-iver","rating-rating-a"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/41201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41201"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=41201"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=41201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}