Bon Iver, Bon Iver-Bon Iver

Bon Iver, Bon Iver is a superficially beautiful album. It’s immediate, not so much in the way that good pop music is immediate—which has to do with pleasant confluence of rhythm and melody—as in the way that good paintings are immediate. The piano plink of “Wash.” and the guitar phrases that opens “Holocene” and the contrast of martial drums and Justin Vernon’s falsetto on “Perth”—individual textures, phrases, even lyrics here are arrestingly gorgeous.

This sort of superficiality is a hallmark of much of what Vernon’s been doing recently—see “Woods” or side project Volcano Choir’s Unmap for evidence. But this fascination with individual elements inevitably undermines an album’s ability to project a singular aesthetic; too many little pieces draw attention away from the larger concept. And in spite of Vernon’s focus on those little pieces, his claim to fame continues to be his much beloved 2007 debut For Emma, Forever Ago, an album that very much espoused a singular aesthetic. Bon Iver, Bon Iver does not.

All this isn’t to say that the surface sheen somehow robs Vernon’s newest record of soul or emotional heft; it doesn’t. Indeed, Vernon’s voice itself is an incredibly evocative instrument. “Hinnom, TX” uses both his lower vocal registers and that ubiquitous falsetto; it’s a jarring contrast that nonetheless feels organic. The album’s two most concise, pop-leaning tracks, “Towers” and “Calgary,” both induce their own uplift-tinged melancholy. In spite of Vernon’s claims that this is a happier, more colorful album than For Emma, it’s never upbeat or celebratory; instead, Bon Iver embodies a type of detached poignancy that feels intimate and distant at the same time.

In contrast with its predecessor, though, Bon Iver is something of a blank slate. For Emma arrived wearing its oft-rehashed narrative on its sleeve and lent itself to a particular interpretation: This, we knew, was an album about love lost, a story of pain and catharsis. Even if Vernon’s lyrics weren’t telling that story themselves, we knew (or thought we knew) how to read those lyrics, how “I’ll be holding all the tickets/And you’ll be owning all the fines” related to his sense of emptiness. Vernon is still a willfully difficult lyricist, but there’s less to grab on to on Bon Iver, less context for his almost indecipherable diction. When he sings “Melic in the naked/Knew a lake/And drew the lofts for page,” on “Michicant,” there’s not much to be taken, literally or figuratively, beyond pleasant consonance.

As a songwriter, this is Vernon’s most frustrating and unusual flaw: His lyrics, however pretty they sound, are merely accomodating these songs, never elucidating or enhancing them. It’s an odd tack, especially for Vernon, someone with no interest in irony and no lack of self-confidence. Just listen to closer “Beth/Rest”—this dude is completely at peace with himself, musically. Why he writes lyrics so obtuse that they require the backstory of For Emma to take on an identifiable meaning, then, remains a mystery.

Vernon may never escape the shadow of that seminal masterpiece, a victim of his own unfortunately compelling origin tale: of a beaten-down man alone in a cabin channeling some honest-to-God bad times into melancholic triumph, and the consequent triumphal trappings (re: smoking Hawaiian herb with Rick Ross, etc.). But Bon Iver, Bon Iver is worth celebrating for its own sake, for its multitude of undeniably powerful moments that exist without context or concrete meaning.