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Bon Iver's acclaimed debut album, For Emma Forever Ago, as featured on
umpteen "best of" 2008 lists, was famously written, performed and recorded
in a secluded wood cabin in the hills of Wisconsin, to which Justin Vernon
had retreated to lick wounds and recuperate following his break-up with the
eponymous Emma. Blood Bank is a four-track EP that has been released fairly
quickly on the album's heels. It sees Vernon moving things on a touch,
artistically, while still retaining much of what made his debut such a
delight to so many.
The title track, and most obvious lead single, tells one of those tales
that is actually, counter-intuitively, lent a sense of realism by its
slightly unlikely nature. A couple meet and get together while waiting to
donate at a blood bank. There's snow on the ground, they warm each others
hands in the car, while a mysterious "secret that you know / that you don't
know how to tell" (...) "fucks with your honour / and it teases your head".
It takes a skilled and proficient lyricist to rhyme "the present" with
"crescent", as Vernon does here, in such an unforced and natural way.
The two middle tracks - Beach Baby, and the curiously punctuated Babys -
are less engaging. On Beach Baby the vocal is pitched higher, and the
lyrics are less audible as a result, which leaves the listener with less to
hook on to. Overall it feels a little amorphous, a little melancholy and
too short to really get going, although the steel guitar break
towards the end is worth hearing.
Babies uses repetition to draw out what feels more like a
sketch of a potential song than a song itself. First of all two piano
chords are repeated over again, then the vocal croons "Summer comes / to
multiply / to multiply" several times. A short verse is sandwiched in the
middle, and then the piano + vocal repetitions are, err, repeated again,
only this time slightly more frenetically.
The best, however, has been saved for last. On Woods there is once again
a phrase that is repeated again and again, but this time it works
brilliantly. The lines "I'm up in the woods / I'm down on my mind / I'm
building a still / To slow down the time" are sung, and put through a range
of vocal effects, so that they progress from a kind of stark austerity to
something more and more elaborate - almost baroque - as the track
progresses.
As an evocation of cabin-fever this is strange, sombre and
touching and the vocal - sometimes a wail, sometimes a croon, sometimes
sounding very human yet at other times impersonal and electronic - builds to
create a thing of cumulative beauty. The ending is abrupt, and the
impression left is considerable.
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Mercury Prize 2009 nominees
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