The Daily Spin, November 15
Bon Iver | i,i
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite songs from each album right here.
Album: i,i (2019)
Artist: Bon Iver
Link:
It’s hard not to look at every aspect of Justin Vernon’s sound as a spiraling growth of itself - from the sparsely emotional swells of For Emma, Forever Ago and his self-titled to the autotuned and anticipatory Blood Bank EP to the wholly synthetic and indescribably haunting 22, A Million.
It’d be simplest to look at his fourth album, i,i, as something grown from his previous works, and in many ways, that feels pertinent. This is a combination of everything he’s done previously, and it’s fine-tuned with the precise eye of someone who knows how to pull from the lowest depths both internally and from others.
The clear best example of this is ‘Hey, Ma’, the closest we get to the “old” Bon Iver - much like ‘8’ from his previous album, this contains the least vocal manipulation, but it’s still lurking throughout - and indeed, as the song reaches its peak, three minutes in, you feel it, piece by piece, floating each instrument until they’re all coiled in this tight arena, locked in step with each other, tangled til the bitter end.
Generally, I prefer the songs where he gets a little stranger with it. ‘iMi’ opens with the fragmented and chopped pleading of associate and colleague Mike Noyce, before Vernon cracks the whole scene open with one vicious blow. Where ‘Hey, Ma’ is the sonic foil to ‘8’, ‘iMi’ feels like the emotional foil - dealing with these themes of heartbreak and the unsteady nature of new feelings that Vernon not only clearly knows, but does such a beautiful job depicting.
I think the tiniest issue I take with this album is that falls into the abstract a bit too much - where 22 toes that line perfectly, I think i,i slips just a little bit, to the point where that hard-hitting feeling that makes this music so fantastic gets stuck behind the insane spirals of Vernon at his very best.
Rating: 9.7/10
Best Tracks: Hey, Ma; Naeem; iMi
Worst Tracks: n/a