Review: Bon Iver, "For Emma, Forever Ago"

Sometimes, my friends interrupt my life to impose imperatives upon me. This has to be, in a lot ways, what friendship is about.

The closest of them will demand (as I probably do too often of them) that I stop whatever it is that I am doing and read a particular book or poem, see a film, or listen to a song or an album. And to do this immediately, with great urgency or else the groundswell of the impassioned appeal, the credibility of the cultural limb the friend is precariously perched upon for me in all its vulnerability and importance will escape my priorities like lesser items on a left-behind grocery list.

I owe the discoveries of some of the most rewarding outputs of artistic exploration to my friends, they are the practitioners and cultivators of my tastes.

I've owned the album For Emma, Forever Ago for exactly four hours now, I am in absolutely no legitimate position to offer a critique of its contents, only to relay my experience with it so far. A good friend prefaced his insistence upon my purchase of this album by saying that all the musical suggestions he'd given me during the previous weekend I had seen him in Philadelphia were to be discarded in lieu of this album.

He immediately explained that the album was recorded by the artist Bon Iver (whose real name I don't yet know) in complete seclusion over a four-month period in a snowy cabin in Wisconsin. Ben is from Wisconsin, but I don't hold this bias against his suggestion. He then immediately told me to ignore the biographical context of the album's production he had just relayed, which I assured him I would try to do. I did not.

I bought the album and took it with me on a rush of errands through the neighborhoods surrounding me. It was raining in New York and then stopping and then misting and then flirting with clarity and then not and raining again. This is not an album you should take with you on a walk into crowded streets.

Bon Iver (whoever he may be) climbs into falsetto for parts of the trip; making it difficult to hear what's being said amid the sonic swirl of taxis-through-puddles, dervish-esque umbrella-dodging, Saturday night foot-shuffling traffic. The album reveals its intention on "Flume" (its first track); the promise that you are being intimately introduced to someone in the least intimate city in the country. He opens softly: I am my mother's only one/That's enough.

On 6th Avenue, the Empire State Building emerges from a haze, I am looking for ink, but the Staples is closed and the Barnes & Noble does not have in stock the book I need for class. While the book remains out of my grasp, the universal poverty of its title Down and Out in Paris and London has extended across the Atlantic into this country's Empire State itself, planting inside my ears with the second track "Lump Sum", featuring a repetition of guitar-strumming that narrowly mirrors techno, if techno had soul and could haunt you like Orwell's shot elephant and other works do.

The poverty is in the simple stripped-down recording, a listener is not to be overcome with wild, myriad effects, mostly just a guitar and a grainy voice asking across a tinny, not small, field of noise to listen to a story.

The third track is where things get messy...for me. "Skinny Love" is the sound of clapping and asking and I am outside the nearest Barnes & Noble to me, only a block from an apartment where I used to live (quite unofficially) with someone.

The song is prodding me and I think it's been almost a year, last year, and through that winter we lasted and in the blooming there were losses and I am now again at the end of another winter and I am almost a year past and it doesn't bother me much anymore and I don't talk about it too often or feel too badly but... it's the action of listening to a story told by a singer living alone in a cabin telling someone absent to "pour a little salt, we were never here/staring at sink of blood and crushed veneer", asking someone "what happened here/suckle on the hope in light brassiere" and it touches that nerve buried like a live wire and then I am on the same block again and walking to get to the next bookstore past the (not quite my) old building with the same doorman under the same astral cap under the same metal porte cochere.

And I make it past and "The Wolves (Part I & II)" is playing like a mourner's march and I spot across 23rd Street the frames of a tall girl with a small dog. And it's dark and raining again of course, and it could be, and it has been that long period of time since meeting and that sinking feeling emerges, and I am almost certain and I look across again as the cars fly between us, and I find that it's not her. It's not her, it's actually the inverse of her: though both tall, the girl has black hair when I was looking for light and the dog, while also small, had gray fur (I suppose like a wolf) and not the dark fur of my former (not quite) best friend.

I was looking at the negative of an old photograph on display across a street, but it's the negative that holds the permanence of the imprint; the physical picture is just a processed replication. What's at the base of me is the negative and in that picture, surrounded by the din of a slowly-building strum, a pulsating construction ("what might have been lost" he cries), I am embattled by a force of pathos and imposition brought on me by my new friend through whom I am no longer just vicariously living.

The next track is called "Blindsided" and I need not tell you how well it fits into everything else.

By the song's end, I am in the next bookstore beside ever-hectic Union Square and there is too much around me to hear clearly. But I've found the book and I can leave and I can buy the ink and I can finish the walk home as it stops raining and I am pausing only to rewind back in the other songs as I pick things out that make me want to stop and listen over again.

And there's probably more I could say about the emotive distortions of the songs and their whispers and whatever. If I were a more responsible critic, I might take you through the songs of the album's second half, which in their own right, hearken back to other longings and distresses, but I'd rather not. I prefer to be a responsible friend and tell you that you probably should stop whatever it is that you are doing and go out and buy this album.