Album Review: Bon Iver - i,i

There’s a line in Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot in which he describes the season of autumn. “It settles,” King writes, “in the way an old friend will settle into your favourite chair and take out his pipe and light it and then fill the afternoon with stories of places he has been and things he has done since last he saw you.” Here too Justin Vernon completes a seasonal cycle; from the winter of For Emma, Forever Ago, through the spring of Bon Iver, Bon Iver, to the summer of 22, A Million, i,i sees us sinking into that inviting armchair, stoking the pipe.

With a similar style and production value to 22, A Million, i,i forces you to really sit and listen without distraction, to go searching for that warmth amid the abstract. However, these 13 tracks are more well rounded than their immediate predecessor. They are more open, expansive and undemanding. More than anything they feel like an amalgamation of the seasons that have come before: welcome cooling from summer, a harvesting of spring’s crops, communal gathering before winter. Look to Faith and Marion for a return to that cabin in Wisconsin, to Naeem for magic percussion layering and keep your face towards the sun with RABi. Consume whole though – everything comes together in its right place.

No matter the axial tilt, Vernon has charted new territory as Bon Iver, and as his cult following would attest, he has mastered it.