So I thought I should actually post something on here, now that it’s been up-and-running for almost two months now. I couldn’t really think of any hip or awesome Philadelphia-related things to write about, maybe because I’m square and technically foreign. As such, I decided to write about an album we have at the station that comes out today in England, and was first self-released in these United States at the end of 2007. The album is
For Emma, Forever Ago, by Bon Iver, the stage name of Wisconsin folkie Justin Vernon. I used to review records back in high school all the time, but it’s been a while since I’ve tried to think about how I feel about a record. This album, though, really made me want to write about music again. I listened to it on a whim one day at the station, without having really read any reviews of it, beyond what the promotional sticker blurb on the front said. What I was greeted with was the wonderfully bleak record about a world seemingly so detached from my own. The emptiness that pervades its songs is haunting, but inviting. From the opening track, “Flume”, you can hear creaks from the wood cabin in the sticks of Wisconsin it was recorded in, and the sparse instrumentation of a single man alone in a bungalow. I saw the loneliness of Vernon’s echoing voice not necessarily as adding a depressing quality to the music, but rather as a sort of audible manifestation of the surroundings the album was created in. Vernon apparently spent four months out on his own, after departing from DeYarmond Edison, his previous band. There are some easy comparisons that I can make of similar sounding artists, namely M.Ward, My Morning Jacket, and Band of Horses, but these are really just because the singers all sound pretty similar. The vocals often remind me, bizarrely, of TV On The Radio – especially on “The Wolves (Act I and II)”. Vernon staggers the overdubs of his vocal tracks, making me think of tracks on
Return To Cookie Mountain. In terms of the music, though, it is similar in instrumentation to early Devendra Banhart – I’m thinking particularly his lo-fi stuff, like
The Black Babies – or even Neil Young’s eponymous debut from 1969. Vernon also sings in a sort of falsetto, but I wouldn’t really compare it to Young’s style. Then there’s the occasional drum, horn and slide guitar that return this record firmly to the modern indie-folk ilk, such as those on the title track.
The album was picked up by Jagjaguwar, a hip little label from Indiana, of all places, and was re-relased with a new cover (both are nice though, as I’ve shown) on February 19th. So I guess I’m not being wonderfully current – I didn’t want to write about the new No Age or Portishead albums, or God forbid, the new Death Cab album that comes out tomorrow. I chose to write about a good album that I’ve found deserves some respect, and one that you can take seriously (unlike Vampire Weekend), but don’t feel like you are doing it because the internet tells you so (unlike Radiohead). Granted, Pitchfork gave
For Emma a good review, as did the A.V. Club, CMJ, and a whole bunch of other credible review outlets, but (other than Pitchfork) they all did it after Bon Iver had built up some hype on his own. Now that this record is old, unhip news, I really suggest you all check it out. It’s the best reason I’ve come up with to date to want to go Wisconsin, because we all know that Vermont has better cheese.
