Bon Iver is a band. This is what Justin Vernon has spent the better part of the past decade trying to prove in interviews, on records, and above all, onstage. The strongest lingering image of Vernon in the broader culture is still the bearded woodsman who retreated to the wilderness with a broken heart and returned with a gnomic, insular album that would against all odds come to define its era, or at least one tendency within it. Or perhaps he is known less by image and more as a disembodied voice, glitching his way across vintage Kanye tracks and rumbling words of self-pity opposite Taylor Swift. It can be hard to see behind these enduring impressions to the other side of Vernon as a collector and convener of people: Vernon the Deadhead jammer, the dungeon master, the guy who transformed a veterinary clinic in Wisconsin into a studio-cum-artist-retreat where musicians can shoot hoops and lounge by a koi pond.
It is this looser and more expansive side of Bon Iver that VOLUMES: ONE "SELECTIONS FROM MUSIC CONCERTS 2019-2023 BON IVER 6 PIECE BAND,” the first in what promises or perhaps threatens to be a series of archival releases, aims to showcase. In the fallow months of 2020, Vernon, isolated again, dipped into the band’s archive of live shows, recorded in pristine quality by engineer Xandy Whitesel, and began to weigh the possibility of a superscored live album that would capture the band’s most inspired interpretations of their post-Bon Iver material. Modeled after Bob Dylan’s never-ending Bootleg Series, the record that eventually emerged makes the case for the malleability of Bon Iver’s songs: their ability to stretch out, scale up, and bear the impress of a varied cast of musicians.
The songs on the last few Bon Iver albums often sound like excerpts from a longer dialogue, at turns offhanded and intense, among collaborators. Vernon has long since abandoned the linear song structures of For Emma, Forever Ago, opting instead for looping sequences that hover just short of resolution. Snipped bits of studio improvisations and artifacts of chance collisions with other artists who happened to be in the room—a baritone guitar loop from the band, a trap 808 from a producer just passing through—form the shifting foundation for Vernon’s unmistakable voice. The sense of space and time these songs create is meditative: a small hollow carved out in history, where you can reflect and brood.
These live versions dynamite that meditative hollow or expand it to the size of a megachurch. The dark low-tuned riff that weaves in and out of “WE” on 2019’s i,i is here slightly unswung and brought to the front, becoming insistent and propulsive rather than textural. “666,” from 2016’s 22, A Million, is cranked up to arena volume, with Jenn Wasner’s guitar chiming big U2 arpeggios and S. Carey’s drums thundering. The drums are the most overt scaling-up device throughout the album. Carey often slowly brings songs to a crescendo and then proceeds to play around or against them with all his strength. As captured in Whitesel’s immaculate recordings, unburied in the studio haze that cloaks most of Bon Iver’s records, this approach is arresting: something like Glenn Kotche drumming for Def Leppard.
Vernon’s voice, too, comes into sharper focus. We are used to hearing him through a halo of reverb, as part of a Vocoder robo-choir, tucked back in the mix, less a focal point than another instrument in the ensemble. Here he is present and central. You can hear all his textures, from his baritone croon to his otherworldly falsetto to his cartoony yelp, more clearly and intimately than ever before. Vernon has plenty of other voices to play off, both sung and instrumental: the soaring vocal contributions of Bon Iver’s Jagjaguwar labelmates Bizhiki infuse “WE” with the convocational energy of powwow singing. There is mercifully little saxophone in these recordings, at least in comparison to the heyday of Vernon’s collaboration with Colin Stetson, which ultimately (through no fault of theirs) made “languid sax wafting over the wasteland” into an indie-music cliche, an all-purpose shortcut for profundity and eclecticism.
The greatest foil to Vernon’s voice, though, is Wasner’s electric guitar. Jenn Wasner, who also plays in Wye Oak and Flock of Dimes, is neither a riffy bludgeoner nor a pure avant-garde texturalist: She is a player who above all traverses the music. She throws crystal shards of chords across songs, winds effortless repeating figures around them, interrupts them with jerky countermelodies. Nowhere is her comping and contrapuntal genius more on display than on SELECTIONS’s extended version of “JELMORE.” In the hands of the six-piece band, the shivering chords of that miniature apocalyptic soul song build into a cathartic climax, which Wasner punctuates with weeping slide guitar. It is a kind of David-Lindley-on-“These Days” moment, but less redemptive—a desperate prayer amid the end times.
There has always been something slightly churchy about Bon Iver’s music. Vernon was a religion major in college, and gospel music has been a notable influence on both his songwriting and his singing. Longtime fans will be pleased to hear “HEAVENLY FATHER,” one of his most beloved songs, get a propulsive full-band treatment on SELECTIONS. But the spiritual heart of the album is its sole cover, a rapturous version of “A Satisfied Mind,” a country song made popular by Mahalia Jackson but also covered by a host of other Vernon-adjacent artists, notably including (on two separate recordings) Bob Dylan. Vernon has revisited this song at critical junctures before: first with his early band DeYarmond Edison, apparently as a vehicle for practicing his falsetto, then at a Eau Claire jazz festival in 2009, on the heels of his breakout success. It is, as Vernon said back then, a song about “what it’s like to be human, to be humble, to be where we’re from.” In the 2017 performance on SELECTIONS, he tackles the song a cappella, flanked by ghost-in-the-machine harmonies: “Money can’t buy back your youth when you’re old/Or a friend when you’re lonesome or a love that’s grown cold.” The computerized voices are so icy and clinical that they somehow become their opposite, circling one another and joining, only to break apart, altered by the contact. It is a kind of cyborg communion, voices thrown skyward. Even when he sings alone, he is multiple.
