#2185 Bon Iver - 22, A Million

I was no big fan of the old Bon Iver - icy, magical, but too whiny, too one-note to hold my attention beyond a listen or two.

But this is different. At its best it's fractured, utterly fragile, crystalline, mysterious, magical.

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I've spent spare cycles trying to pin down what the 10's sound is, going to be, and 2016 seems to be suggesting that it's the decade of production. I talked about it in my A Moon Shaped Pool review- after the 00's splintering of rock into cute/pretty/wistful/adventurous near-pop, a lot of the interesting music coming along doesn't present rock-traditional performance at all. Any plucking of strings and thrumming of throats is just raw material for something strange and broken - a reflection of our right-fucked, terrified, better-virtual-than-dead present, maybe.

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Bon Iver's striking reinvention reminds me of Radiohead's latest, but also the autotune-and-worse fuckery of 808s/Fantasy/Yeezus era Kanye, with no small hints of Laurie Anderson's vocal fantasias. The first sound you hear is a held note, buzzing and clipping like a glitched video of a ringing bell, joined by another voice, at least as frail, delivering the least//most reassuring message imaginable through all that tenuousness: "it might be over soon".

It's a staggering way to open a record, and there is only the barest hint of levity - instead the uncertainty turns itself inside out, resolving into a desperate kind of hope. It might be over soon.

A few minutes later comes 715 - Creeks, a fucking landmark track. Just Vernon's voice, twice, dueling dual-autotuned, surging and dropping. Not a single instrument, not a single drum beat, just two minutes of cryptic writhing, chopping you off at the knees. A wildly adventurous, effortlessly effective piece of songwriting.

The album's a bit frontloaded, but it's short, and gets by on its momentum. As the songs grow longer on the second side, as the album's strange surging method becomes familiar, you settle into snow and let the stars burst, marveling at the time dilation of that infintite 34 minutes, over soon, ready to replay.

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I fetishize, sometimes, the creation born via uncertain means, for alien purpose. But its a fine line between that imagined purpose and chaos, between strange purpose and no purpose at all? 22, A Million rides that line thrillingly close to the edge and lands on four wheels, a highwire wobble resolved, confidence restored, leaving you all the more thrilled for ever doubting it. Even all the cover art symbols, the ascii-fucked song titles, it all works as a strange, novel artifact. I couldn't have seen this coming from Bon Iver - this album gives me hope after all, the long way around 4.5/5