Album Review: De La Soul - Bon Iver - 22, A Million

4/5

The biggest surprise on Bon Iver’s third album comes right at the end, when Wicklow singer, Fionn Regan, is conjured as an ethereal sample. “Cause the days have no numbers,” croons Regan, as crepuscular piano keys shudder and groan. It’s quintessential Bon Iver — an ocean of feeling churning beneath an icy surface.

Regan’s moment arrives at the conclusion of ‘00000 Million’, one of the more conventionally folksy tracks on a collection that elsewhere buries its crowd-pleasing tendencies under drifts of feedback and vocal distortions. Such formal obtuseness has fuelled the idea that 22, A Million is Justin Vernon’s “coming to terms with fame” record, a dirge in 10 parts in which Kanye West’s hippest collaborator reflects on the endless ways celebrity can corrode the soul.

Yet this simplistic narrative ill-serves an LP that brims with mystery and which casts Vernon as a deeply enigmatic narrator, by turns angst-ridden and quietly joyous. Better to concentre on the formal architecture of the project, which applies a fuzzy electronic makeover to sturdy campfire ballads. Typical is ‘21 MN WATER’, a lament upholstered with a lulling dubstep beat and an airy synth line.

As with 2011’s Bon Iver, Vernon demonstrates a transgressive attachment to early 1980s soft pop, with ‘8 (circle)’ a cousin twice remove from Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air Tonight’ and ‘666’ materialising from an alternative universe, where artists are still writing songs for Miami Vice.

Far from a criticism, this is merely evidence of how far Vernon is prepared to look for inspiration. Such willingness to take risks and potentially alienate a fanbase that would probably prefer he rehashed the angry-dude-in-the-woods bromides of his 2007 debut, For Emma Forever Ago, remains his greatest strength. 22 A Million is strange, diffuse, and aloof — but it may also be Vernon’s masterpiece.