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![Bon Iver - Blood Bank [EP] review](http://www.sweetslyrics.com/poze/fgfhdfagsdgsdgdf.jpg) Bon Iver's auspicious For Emma, Forever Ago ended on a cliffhanger: If the exceptional collection was little more than Justin Vernon's spit-shined demo tape, what would happen when the man (and a band) actually stepped into a studio? The Blood Bank EP (available on vinyl and digitally) seeks to answer that question. The titular song is the most developed, and it walks an exceedingly steady line between the slow chug of Songs:Ohia and the crystalline soul of Coldplay. That's not to say that a more produced, three-piece Bon Iver is a boring Bon Iver, but in spite of its wintry tale of finding love in an unlikely place, "Blood Bank" leaves something to be desired—namely the fragility and unplanned expansiveness that defined Emma. Fortunately, this set's remaining songs benefit from feeling slightly incomplete. On "Beach Baby," Vernon's voice sounds as delicate as blown glass with nothing but guitar (acoustic and slide) to buffer it from the outside world. "Babys" finds him crooning damaged R&B over Reich-like piano repetition, while "Woods" is a cappella, but for the vocoder that lends strange resonance to his mantra, "I'm building a still to slow down time." These three songs feel like test runs—pilot duets between Vernon and a specific instrument—and that's promising. What fans should be nervous about is Bon Iver figuring itself out....full text |
| Nytimes |
| Justin Vernon, the singer-songwriter behind Bon Iver, made one of the most haunting debuts in recent memory — “For Emma, Forever Ago,” released on Jagjaguwar last year — by calling on complex emotions and drifts of dark-hued falsetto. His new EP, “Blood Bank,” is due out on Tuesday on the same label, and three of its four songs abide by similar prescriptions. In “Beach Baby,” a countryish waltz, and “Babys,” a ballad with an itchy piano underlay, Mr. Vernon conjures thoughts of summertime from a distance. The title track feels better nourished and resides more comfortably in a furtive, wintry mode. But then there’s “Woods,” an a cappella plaint that alludes to Mr. Vernon’s much publicized songwriting sabbatical in a remote Wisconsin cabin: I’m up in the woods I’m down on my mind I’m building a still To slow down the time That’s the whole song, lyrically: its power lies in layering and repetition, Bon Iver trademarks. The twist is that Mr. Vernon uses what sounds like Auto-Tune — the digital pitch-correction device that has risen to recent, flagrant ubiquity in pop — to manipulate his multitracked vocals. Consider it a piece of commentary, or a conceptual joke, or a subversion of rustic naturalism. Whatever the case, it’s wonderfully strange, and in that sense true to form....full text |
| Drownedinsound |
| In a year of reclusive solo artists, it’s odd no-one chose to compare Bon Iver and Burial, seeing as how the similarities extend far beyond their media-profiles. Some while back, before his unmasking, the Artist Still Mostly Known as Burial described ‘Archangel’ as the realization, or vocalization, of the feminine part of his soul. It’s unclear how many distinct voices sing the sequential phrases "Holding you / Kissing you / Let it be alone" – whether it’s a single take, pitch-shifted in real-time (to locate the least artificial-sounding voice, on that last phrase), or several overdubbed; point is: the production enacts a search for that anima, and the process of its recovery or integration into the psyche of the song, or singer. Listening to the ‘Blood Bank’ EP, it seems curiously apposite to think of Justin Vernon entering the same headspace as Burial by a different door, when he spent that now-fabled winter recording in a log-cabin; hey, even his riffs have a percussive, metallic clatter, reminiscent of dubstep rhythms (check ‘For Emma’ and ‘Flume’ especially). See, Justin’s Unconscious may not have let him recognize it – arriving at an unmistakably male falsetto, rather than any Prince-style sonic-travesty – but the whole album cried out to recreate a feminine voice, right there with him in that log cabin, to be breathing her in and out, instead of picturing her faintly in an increasingly distant past....full text |
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