i For Detail
Justin Vernon, leader of the alt-folk band Bon Iver, called their 2016 album 22, A Million, “a new way of telling a story.” It was an understatement. 22, A Million was as experimental as it’s possible to get (short of going atonal), with tons of distortion, drop-outs, and weird sonic artefacts. The combination of disorientating sonic weirdness, gorgeous melodies and crazy song titles proved enormously successful, both critically and commercially. 22, A Million was a major achievement, but, as is often the case with artistic high points, where could they go from there? Getting even weirder risked severing their connection with popular culture, while a more straight-up album might be considered a retreat.
The follow-up album, I,I, released in August, provides the answer. In many ways it is a return to more traditional songwriting, with longer tracks and more traditional song structures. It’s still awash with sonic experimentation but in this case the production weirdness is never so dramatic that it pushes the songs to break down, and Vernon’s voice sounds more natural and is more centre stage. With the novelty of the extreme production experimentation gone, reviews of I,I were slightly more mixed, while remaining overwhelmingly positive. One reviewer had it right when he called I,I “a moment of consolidation,” and concluded that the result is “a mature masterpiece and a stunning marriage of ambition and technique.”
Another interesting difference between and its predecessor is that many of the performance and production credits on were deliberately obscure, with names like ‘Noble Black Eagle’, ‘Trust Ear’ and ‘Scream Defence’. The credits for , in contrast, simply list Chris Messina, Brad Cook and Justin Vernon as co-producers, while everyone else gets instrument, writing and/or technical credits. While Messina was credited as, on he’s credited as playing keyboards on some tracks as well as being involved in production, engineering and mixing. Zach Hanson, who had the least cryptic credit on with ‘Professional Mixer,’ has straight engineering and mixing credits on .
