Albumalia: 22, A Million — Bon Iver
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No matter what words I put forth, sat here at my desk, I can’t magically make this blog not silent.
More to a point: I can’t make them sound — in your head — the way they do in mine.
I cannot, for all my striving, make you hear anything when you decode these volumes of pixels but that which you decide. Maybe this sentence is vaguely European-sounding, or reminiscent of the way your parents you used to tell you stories. Maybe you’re amused by the thought of me sounding like that know-it-all kid you knew in High School.
The struggle is ultimately idiosyncratic — a very human kind of “silly” that persists as a hallmark of the grand tradition of communication.
At least, that’s the nice way of looking at it (the clinical way.)
Here’s the not so nice way:
Where are you gonna look for confirmation?
You’re alone.
You’re alone and you always will be alone. You’re trapped — somewhere in Greece — with a newfound panic attack that shows no signs of anything but hideous swelling. You cannot connect, you cannot recall, and all the free-verse poetry starring a laundry list of bygone lovers does nothing to reconcile your crisis.
I don’t know who to raise
I don’t know who can call up all the questions,
Who or what do you believe? You built so much around such Romantic ideas — why aren’t they helping?
It might be over soon. . .
This is just a feeling, however, and it (along with you) shall pass. But there’s such a strong need to quantify it — to solve the feelings and make them something more manageable, like a collection of symbols or an algorithm. Soon you’re knee deep in a pool of 21st century superstitions and a half-successful attempt to digitize your confusion.
Philosophize and figure
What I have and haven’t held
As the album art shows: there’s only so much mythologizing you can undertake before your house of explanations becomes cluttered and nonsensical. Is that going to stop you from turning every place of heartbreak into an altar at the foot of the mountain? No.
Canonize, canonize. . .
But 22, A Million doesn’t tell you that meaning is lost, only that you’ve been looking in the wrong places for it.
Musically, it’s the perfect iteration of what Justin Vernon can do with production. This album is an experience — so far removed from Emma and the self-titled predecessor and still so securely identifiable. It’s shocking and breathtaking at times to witness a devoutly acoustic songwriter delve so deeply into the realm of glitch sounds and audio effects. I was unshakably attentive for the coming of each new track, feeling over and over the way I did when I first heard Imogen Heap’s Hide And Seek.
This album adds up to a haunting soundscape that sounds like fatigue; fatigue towards the over-stimulated message boards and Facebook feeds of the digital battlegrounds that have stepped forth to fill the vacancy left by human connection. You expect Vernon’s music to caress and embrace you. But no one can touch you through a plane of glass, no matter how luminous.
One perhaps-valid and often repeated criticism of 22 is the notion that it rarely showcases fully-developed songs, lending itself more toward a collection of gimmicky demos than whole pieces of art. And I won’t argue that point here, but I will say that this very “weakness” is a strength from where I stand. That is because I am not interested in listening to a collection of songs nearly as much as I am in listening to an album. And the journey of 22, A Million is phenomenal.
These will just be places to me now
“These will just be places to me now,” Justin says. Out of a season where every song was rooted in the headspace of a particular location, he calls out to us the lesson he’s learned.
To qualify the statements I made at the start: I might never be able to impart exactly what I feel to you, but I have no evidence that proves I don’t get close enough. That’s easy to forget when you’re fixated on the scission. And as long as you are here, reading these words, then they’re not silent — not really.
Our never-ending need to quantify? To mathematically rectify our own incongruities? It’s an error of human processing. It does nothing for you in the end but tear you further away from a full and honest experience. There is no magic sequence of primes or spiritual ward you can place on your doorframe to keep the demons away. You just have to face them, every time, head on.
This is the better way to live. The haunting won’t magically cease, and there’s no guarantee that you won’t be caught in a fire again, but it will be you, living.
And the days have no numbers
