New music review: Bon Iver ponders a wider world

Bon Iver, "i, i" (Jagjaguwar)

"I can hear crying," Justin Vernon sings on his new album as Bon Iver, and your first thought is: Well, of course.

Part of a loose confederacy of sad but soulful alt-pop artisans that also includes James Blake and Thom Yorke, Vernon of Eau Claire, Wis., has found big success (and two Grammys) by exploring heartbreak and anxiety in carefully rendered recordings that show just where he puts all his obsessive energy. Since emerging in 2008 with "For Emma, Forever Ago," he's become such a reliable source of moody sensitivity that rappers from Travis Scott to Eminem now turn to him when they want to get in their feelings.

Yet it's not his own well documented pain that Vernon seems to be describing in "Naeem," a stately ballad that comes halfway through "i, i," which unexpectedly appeared last week on streaming services, three weeks before the album's announced Aug. 30 release date.

"All along me, I can hear you," he sings over a rippling groove of piano and horns. "All around me, I can hear 'em."

It's one of many indications on Bon Iver's fourth full-length that Vernon has gotten outside his head to ponder the wider world.

In "Jelmore," amid the honk and squelch of a vintage synthesizer, he conjures the threat of climate change with the image of a thrift shop manager holding a gas mask. "How long will you disregard the heat?" he wonders.

And then there's "Sh'Diah," whose title Vernon has said shortens an unprintable phrase referring to what he thinks of as the crummiest day in American history: the day after President Donald Trump's election.

Vernon's comments are crucial to divining his meaning in lyrics that can still tend toward the almost comically opaque. But the music on "i, i" bolsters this newly outward-looking sense; it's far more spacious than the hushed acoustic laments of "For Emma, Forever Ago" or the cloistered electro-folk sound of the group's last album, 2016's "22, A Million."

"Holyfields" layers a bleeping keyboard over wide-open movie-score strings; "Faith" has gently strummed guitars and prairie-style fiddle.

To make the record, Vernon convened a large cast of players, including folks known for their work with the likes of Frank Ocean and Young Thug, as well as one of his avowed musical heroes, Bruce Hornsby; Hornsby gets a vocal line all to himself in "U (Man Like )," and it's not the only time here that Vernon passes the mic to someone else.

Several of the album's songs began as part of "Come Through," an elaborate music-and-dance production that Bon Iver recently developed with Twin Cities' TU Dance company, and you can hear the effect of that experience in Vernon's willingness to spotlight various instrumentalists, as in "Sh'Diah," which has a lengthy saxophone solo by Twin Citian Mike Lewis.

Indeed, for all the signs of trouble that Vernon finds in modern America, he can't help but finish this album on an optimistic note that seems to proceed directly from his clear musical satisfaction.

"Some life feels good now, don't it ?" he sings in "Rabi," a warm blend of down-home country and R &B. By that point, the tears are long gone.

Mikael Wood, Los Angeles Times

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