Bon means good

The “indie rock” genre covers an exceedingly broad range of sounds – so broad as to make its utility questionable. Among these are types of music that aren’t, strictly speaking, rock at all: lo-fi folk (such as Elliott Smith and Iron and Wine) and chamber pop (such as Belle and Sebastian and Andrew Bird). The former, of course, strips things down to a minimum: a voice, an acoustic guitar and some preferably primitive recording technology. The latter layers things into expansive, baroque compositions: not just drums and guitar, but horns, strings, accordions and so on.
In his debut album as Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago, Justin Vernon has remarkably merged these two divergent types of music, creating a sort of “missing link” to further confound rock critics’ efforts at categorization.
The backstory of For Emma is resolutely the stuff of lo-fi folk. Following the breakup of his band DeYarmond Edison, a split with his girlfriend and a bad case of mono, a depressed Vernon holed up in his father’s isolated Wisconsin cabin and started cranking out songs. The soulful vocals and acoustic strumming that form the backbone of For Emma’s tracks palpably reflect the melancholy loneliness of this experience, while the incidental noises of Vernon adjusting instruments and microphones argue for its homespun status.
In that cabin, Vernon was not only armed with a guitar and microphone, but with a laptop – and, thus, the man alone became his own orchestra. So, a church choir opens the song “Lump Sum” and horns resound in “For Emma” and, most notably, Vernon duets with himself on layered vocals throughout, singing both the high and low parts. Stripped-down simplicity this is not.
All this makes for an exciting debut, marred only by the fact that the focus on establishing Bon Iver’s sound makes the album a bit uniform and leads the impressionistic vocals – chosen more for how they sound than what they say – to be a bit bland. But if you need wintry music to go with the grey skies and icy sidewalks, For Emma is for you.