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A Follow-Up Fit for a King... Or President

Bon Iver releases eagerly-anticipated EP

Bon Iver

Blood Bank EP

Released on Jan 20, 2009

I find it fitting that Bon Iver’s Blood Bank EP was released on the same day America inaugurated Barack Obama as president.  I know it’s a stretch, but I believe Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and President Obama share a few things in common.  First, if we think back to the first two months of 2007, when Vernon had just recorded For Emma, Forever Ago and Obama had just announced his candidacy, I doubt anyone could have guessed where they’d be in January of 2009.  Even the most optimistic Obama supporters had a hard time imagining their candidate competing against Hillary Clinton, let alone securing the nomination and winning the election.  Likewise, when Vernon wrote and recorded For Emma, Forever Ago in a hunting cabin in the dead of winter, I doubt he expected listenership beyond family, friends and fans in the Eau Claire, Wisconsin area, let alone a record deal, a globe-trotting tour and a spot on every best-of list for 2008.  So Obama is the relatively inexperienced but infinitely gifted politician who ascended to the presidency and Vernon is the flannel-flaunting, falsetto-folk singer-songwriter who became a smash hit virtually overnight.

Obama and Vernon are also seemingly geniuses, the former politically and the latter musically.  Not only that, but both surround themselves with others who are equally talented.  Obama’s picks are obvious, but the musicians who’ve been touring with Vernon and who play on the Blood Bank EP add depth, rhythm and rich vocal harmonies to Vernon’s already stellar singer-songwriting.  Speaking of the Blood Bank EP, I’m still trying to figure out what it means that I’m nearly as excited about four new songs from Bon Iver as I am about Obama’s inauguration.  As it happens, the Blood Bank EP is simply that good. 

I first heard the title track during Bon Iver’s performance at San Francisco's Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival this past August.  With its slightly fuzzy guitars and driving drumbeat, it stood in marked contrast to the relatively calm, guitar-led focus on For Emma, Forever Ago.  Brilliant, yes, but different.  After seeing the band again in December at their sold-out show at The Vic, where they built up For Emma tracks “Creature Fear” and “The Wolves (Act I And II)” like Explosions In The Sky would, the rockin’ “Blood Bank” feels right at home.  Apparently a tale of love at a blood bank complete with family secrets, crescent moons and candy bars, the song achieves an incredible amount of urgency descending just three chords, lacking a chorus and with a simple, driving beat.

“Beach Baby” is the Blood Bank EP’s relatively calm, guitar-and-vocal duet that sounds more like a B-side to For Emma than anything else, but in its two-minute and thirty-odd second lifespan, it does work its magic.  Vernon almost whimpers as he sings about a lover he knows is about to leave.  A solemn slide guitar riff signifies the doubt and instability that follows a love lost.

Everybody loves a clanking piano song like LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” or Spoon’s “The Ghost of You Lingers.”  Bon Iver delivers a great one with “Babys.”  A collage of clanking piano keys takes us from the wintry sounds of “Beach Baby” through the spring and to the summer.  On a track devoted to biological renewal and rebirth, when Vernon and company sing “Summer comes, to multiply” over the piano, we can almost see time-lapse footage of frozen water turning into babbling brooks and flowers pushing up through the ground and issuing their beautiful blooms.  At times “Babys” feels like a build-up song, and it may leave you wishing that it was, but like The Who’s “Baba O’Riley,” it builds and builds but ends on a final strum that isn’t any harder than the one that came before it. 

Since Kanye West seemingly owns auto-tune at this particular point in time, it’s tempting to say that Bon Iver pulls a Kanye on “Woods” as the nearly five-minute acapella track is stuffed with auto-tuned vocal harmonies.  But the vocal effect probably owes more to Air’s "Le soleil est près de moi" than it does to today’s auto-tuned hip-hop.  At the same time, Vernon’s vocals are rooted not in folk but in R&B, with high-pitched falsetto notes and harmonies that flutter grace notes like Boyz II Men.  The New York Times criticized Bon Iver for using auto-tune on For Emma track “The Wolves (Act I And II)” because it represented an electronic intrusion on an otherwise earth-toned album.  The auto-tune saturated “Woods” is a legitimate response because it ditches guitars in favor of electronic wah’s on acapella vocals.  The result is something you absolutely have to hear.

Though the Blood Bank EP may be viewed as a quick follow-up to the successful For Emma, Forever Ago, its four songs are beautiful and rich enough to stand as masterpieces in their own right.  If For Emma was winter and the Blood Bank EP is summer, as the issuing record label Jagjaguwar described it, we have at least two more releases from Bon Iver before we’ll need to invent sub-seasons to keep this musical genius at work.

Posted by Ben Wadington on Jan 22, 2009 @ 12:00 am