Bon Iver

22, A Million

After a few plays, 22, A Million begins to make a beautiful kind of sense. It’s the natural evolution of Vernon’s sound, back from when he experimented with a vocoder on the final track on the Blood Bank EP, Woods. And the songs themselves, once they’re stripped of all the vocal trickery, are as heartbreaking as ever.

These songs are chaotic, unexpected and jarring. Samples, vocoders, and shambling synths crash together in an unstructured soundscape. But if you listen through the anarchy, you will find a stirring, masterful odyssey.

It’s an otherwordly record made up of textures of distorted samples, soaked in vocoder, each track a dense fog.

22, A Million is a progressive and standalone album full of deep emotions and clever ingenuity.

If it seemed incongruous that Justin Vernon was rolling with Kanye West on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in 2010 and Yeezus in 2013, Vernon’s new LP as Bon Iver shows that the indie-folk singer and megastar rapper are, in many ways, kindred spirits.

’22, A Million’ sees Bon Iver exploring and collating new sounds so beautifully while also remaining true to Vernon’s core as an artist and individual.

22, A Million synthesizes archaic and future styles—or, rather, organic and synthetic sounds—to address and remedy the ailments of the present.

With his long-awaited third album, Vernon completely breaks from his guitar-hugging persona, leaving it in the woods like a Coen brothers corpse as he flexes a mastery of processed vocals, samples, loops, beats, synths and noise, along with more familiar trappings.

His music has always had what you might call its Kid A side. His third album represents the point where the thinking behind something like 2009’s Babys, an abstract assemblage of keening harmonies, icy electronics and crashing cymbals, takes over his music completely.

It's an impressive feat of reinvention that manages to keep Vernon's emotional core fully intact no matter how far the music strays from established Bon Iver territory.

As with his work that precedes it, the impact of Vernon's 22, A Million far outlasts that moment when the record stops playing. What Bon Iver manages to do in barely 34-minutes, other artists often cannot do in a career.

22, A Million is the band’s most impressive record to date, surging forward with oddities that, while certainly nothing new to adventurous listeners, bridge the gap with satisfaction.

He sings with the sad weight of a man who has survived a dark night of the soul, filling his opaque songs with transcendent emotion and other-worldly beauty that can make you feel foolish for even questioning what it could possibly all mean.

A succinct record of compressed and distorted ventures into folk, atmospheric electronica and blues.

It may be doomed to be the drifting soundtrack to many a hipster coffee shop afternoon but listen closely and 22, A Million is subtle, weird and compelling – a brief, beautiful hallucination.

Banjos and atmospheric drums collide with heaving synths and discordant saxes throughout, sometimes yielding cuts more notable for their experimentation than their pop pleasures.

The album dares you to come closer, to peer into its depths and figure it out. But in the end, there may not be anything to figure out.

22, A Million is a gorgeous victory and a righteous revival of a talent that for a moment was only best displayed on records by Kanye West.

The flashes of brilliance in Justin Vernon’s dark night of the soul are frustratingly few on his cryptic, effects-laden third album.