The closer feels like a campfire, warming a frosty night sky, and pulls heavily from gospel and folk music, at which point I’ve warmed to the album as it has promptly ended. “_45_” (seriously, these track titles) builds upon it and works in a twinkling banjo and produces the ethereal, entrancing sound that will feel familiar to listeners of Bon Iver’s previous work. This often leaves them just as ideas, without any expansion.īy “8 (circle)” though, I begin to feel as though I’ve been overly harsh on 22, A Million, as I thoroughly enjoy moments in it and the horn section and layered vocals work really well. To make matters worse, many of the ideas that do whir into action have mere seconds to present themselves and expand, with many of the worst offending tracks hovering around the two-minute mark. “29 #Strafford APTS” is a prime example of this, marking the transition point of the album from fragmented to slightly more grounded, a really foul distortion ruptures into a peaceful, soulful track towards the end, seemingly without reason and I don’t think I can quite express how frustrating I find this specific example without swearing a lot. The production does nothing for these tracks, at least in my view, usually actively detracting from the overall impact.
Though I largely find my criticisms with the former rather than the latter half, the pseudo lo-fi, over compressed, hard panned, autotuned, sample spattered, bleep dotted, and essentially messy production and aesthetic really frustrates me, getting in the way of what, in many cases, sound like solid, folky, ethereal tracks and ideas. That doesn’t, however, mean I enjoy the result. Why are the track titles named in the style of a quirky EDM outfit? Why has someone thrown all the effects in their rack at most of tracks? (I thought I had a dodgy connection for the first couple.) Why have Justin Vernon’s already strong, soulful vocals been drenched in enough autotune to make even Kanye blush? Why don’t I ‘get’ this release like the rest of the Internet does?īon Iver’s latest release shows a clear, striking difference to their previous material, and I commend the experimentation and breaking out of the mould that they’ve built themselves. I guess my recurring question when discussing this album is, ‘Why?’. Of course there are lovely moments, but the lo-fi hiccups are too infuriating for me to get any real enjoyment from 22, A Million. Gimmicky production techniques are preferred to musical progressions, and it does not pay off. This is no development, but a fragmented regression: 22, A Million is the skeleton of a potentially fruitful album. Vernon deserves admiration for attempting to expand his sound, but both the vision and execution are way off. It plays like a scrapbook of impulsive thoughts that burns on the campfire. The lyrics, though fractured, are clearly heartfelt - yet I remain completely unaffected. Justin Vernon sounds separate from the World, buried by static and noise, and layered with jarring autotune. The best songs here flourish because they are written with structural purpose, and don’t just consist of fractured vocals drifting through a melancholic space. Instead, they thrived on brilliant, dynamic songwriting, and this is something 22, A Million lacks. Yet the best records from these artists - The College Dropout, Channel Orange, For Emma, Forever Ago - didn’t require obscure mixing or wobbly structures. The emphasis has shifted from being focused to feeling esoteric and excessively unconventional.
The record follows a ridiculous trend that was prominent on Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo and carried over to recent releases from Frank Ocean and James Blake - for whatever reason, albums must now be messy, vague, and incoherent. 22, A Million is an unnecessarily complicated record: overly processed vocals, chopped-up lyrics, and saturated samples are the prime focus, overruling any instance of decent songwriting that you’d usually come to expect from Bon Iver. It’s a type of elusiveness that isn’t so much rewarding as it is mundane. Arrangements are frequently muddled, often to the point of obscurity. Melodies come in sketches, and hooks are a curious rarity. It doesn’t deal in structure, but in loose clusters of peculiar sounds and imperceptible words. 22, A Million feels like a nondescript blur.
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