Bon Iver

Blood Bank EP (Jagjaguwar)

By Rebecca Shore
Published: January 18th, 2009 | 9:00am

Trying to top the brilliance that was Bon Iver's 2008 debut, For Emma, Forever Ago, is a tall — to the point of looming — order. The transfixing collection, written and recorded in a cabin deep in the Wisconsin wilderness, is as beautiful and as raw as it gets. While Bon Iver's EP release, Blood Bank (featuring two additions to Justin Vernon’s previous one-man lineup), doesn't surpass the simple beauty of For Emma, it is a solid display of growth and experimentation.

If at the end of the For Emma, the sound of Vernon putting his guitar down signifies closure on the stage of his life he described as "cancerous mediocrity," then the third track on Blood Bank (“Babys”) shows renewed optimism discovered outside of the cabin. Taking his band's name from a purposeful misspelling of bon hiver, French for "good winter," Vernon muses about a good summer (Summer comes / To multiply…I'm the carnival of peace / I'll probably start a fleet / With no apologies). The staccato repetition is more up-tempo than we're used to from him, and it strays from the traditional song form. "Woods," the fourth and last track on the EP, is the most dramatic departure. Vernon's a cappella voice is filtered through a vocoder, giving it a heavily electronic edge and initially off-putting vibrato. The song itself, a 19-word anthem to solitude, is seeped in soulfulness.

The two opening tracks, "Blood Bank" and "Beach Baby," more closely evoke the things we're used to from Vernon — the soft guitars, the effortless falsetto, the folksiness. The lyrics from "Beach Baby" are beautifully ambiguous — “When you're out / Tell your lucky one / To know that you'll leave / But you don't lock when you're fleeing / I'd like not hear keys” — and are followed by twangy guitars.

It took multiple exposures to warm up to the new sound, but in the end, it's evident that Vernon has discovered the tools for breaking the singer-songwriter glass ceiling that says an audience will only care about your melancholy for so long. In the case of Bon Iver, we still care.

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