Bon Iver have bestowed experience to craft an emotional tour-de-force that displays an unparalleled understanding of the power of music.
Bon Iver have imperceptibly moved from requesting close listening to requiring it, and i,i spins a mesmerising web of superficially insubstantial yet intensely majestic music.
i,i is a mature masterpiece and a stunning marriage of ambition and technique.
Bon Iver’s fourth full-length, i,i, feels as confident as anything he’s ever done: a dense, richly layered showcase for his continued aversion to the standard rules of grammar and the deepening of his defiantly uncommercial sound.
You’ll want to spend another eighty minutes or more, listening to, breathing in, warming up, and getting comforted by the smooth sounds of the genius that is Bon Iver. This release is the band at their finest.
The punctuation that served prismatic purpose on 22, A Million is looking backwards on i,i, filling in the gaps of a catalogue that has quietly engrained itself in the canon of independent music, but still plays with the inquisitiveness and freedom of cats in the nighttime.
He is making music that, far from being strange, is actually as inviting as anything he has ever done.
Central to it all ... is a Justin Vernon with an altered disposition, more confident and looser—at times, he even sounds content, miles beyond the heartbroken For Emma solitude.
Throughout all of Bon Iver’s music, Vernon’s voice is the core. In this aspect, i,i is no different than any other Bon Iver album. Yet it is the culmination of all the various voices that Vernon has employed throughout his musical career that makes this album special.
There’s a warmth to the album overall, delicately balanced with vulnerability, making it equal parts comforting and heartbreaking.
This tricky, fickle, strange dedication to emotional progress is what defines Bon Iver, makes them so uniquely, irrefutably human, and so goddamn touching even when you can't understand what a single lyric means.
There is a tangible sense of joy in performance, although with no greater clarity of lyrical expression.
It’s in sitting with i,i that the album truly blossoms and reveals itself as Bon Iver’s most idealized work.
If 22, A Million could come off as sometimes cold and always anxious, then i,i is the warm flipside, with songs that float and flutter, that call for resilience rather than resignation.
It plays like a collection of first-draft Psalms for a congregation at a Crossroads, or perhaps one persistently and violently driven toward the edge of the World as we know it.
If you have the patience to drill deep enough into i,i, the bright spots are incandescent.
This is an album that you can feel as well as experience, perhaps the most complete Bon Iver album to date. Justin Vernon’s emotive approach to the album balances the individual and the communal with perfect precision.
He's always taking a big swing. That alone is worth celebrating, but when he hits the mix right on i,i, all of these high-minded thoughts go out the window, and Bon Iver rises to something truly inspiring.
You can let i,i overwhelm you or sink into its currents of drift and despondency – either way, it is immersive and rich. Yet it’s hard not to anticipate certain peaks (the unimpeachable climax of “Holyfields,” the joyfully silly “Sh’Diah” chorus) as if waiting for the school bell to ring.
i,i is in a sense a refinement of 22, A Million's innovations, but Justin Vernon still doesn't seem particularly interested in tying up his songs' loose ends.
Justin Vernon has succumbed to his most inane impulses – and released a selection of unseasoned, lightly scented pleasantries that neither hit or miss. They just are.
I,I takes many mighty swings and at best knocks out a few infield hits, while striking out far too often.
Justin Vernon has been building Bon Iver into an artistic commune of shared ideals – but loses his way in a fog of weak melodies and bad poetry.
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