22, A Million

Although the presentation has changed, the raw emotional power at the heart of Bon Iver is intact.

22, A Million is an entirely different kind of beast. Not only does it confirm that Vernon is a modern visionary at the forefront of folk, but it sets the new standard for experimentalism in alternative music.

Everything about the album is fragmented, and dizzying in the vein of Samuel Beckett’s Not I or T.S. Elliot’s The Waste Land. Even the lyric sheet is a glorious mess.

He’s still capable of moments of absolute beauty.

Not since Kid A has an album so superb pushed away and pulled closer its audience, simultaneously and with such aplomb.

The sum of its parts adds up to Bon Iver’s most challenging work to date; 22, A Million is an album that rejects comfort and expectations in favor of provoking listeners to make new discoveries. If this challenge is taken, it is a rewarding experience that only grows in beauty with each listen.

The music’s vision and beauty hold together regardless, a sturdy and unparalleled step of confidence.

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.

22, A Million is a triumph even before ‘666 ʇ’ and the Springsteen-dashed ‘8 (circle)’ cast their own entrancement. The beauty of it is that this is a puzzle, one that will initially confuse and ultimately resonate in a way that feels deeply organic.

When it hits, as on the wistful Fionn Regan sample on the closing 00000 Million or the breathtaking piano introduction to 33 “GOD” you know that this strange, beautiful, willfully obtuse album is one that you’ll want to live with for a very long time.

22, A Million sounds only like itself.

The wonder of 22, A Million is how beautifully he melds the disparate forms--inside and outside, acoustic and digital, past and future, ground level and interstellar. It’s a stunning record, well worth the wait.

It's an emphatic step forward, a gorgeous album that, rather than running from it, reflects our fractured world back at us.

Yes, 22, A Million is painfully, painfully sincere. Yes, it’s also hopelessly oblique, grandiose, and pretentious. Yet it’s also an absolute diamond of a record, at once fragrantly beautifully and also hopelessly complex, easy to disregard and yet thoroughly hypnotic.

There’s certainly a sense of urgency here, and also sublime moments on songs that overlay beauty with turbulence in a way that suggests an anguished soul reaching for solace amid turmoil.

Vernon's gorgeous falsetto and vice grip on melody hold it all together beautifully. [No. 137, p.52]

22, A Million can stand confidently as the only album to bridge Hornsby’s The Way It Is with Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak.

Vernon is in no rush to clear up any of this--to harden ideas about himself or his art--on 22, a Million, which represents an even bigger leap than Bon Iver’s previous record.

No matter how conceptual he gets, the pleasures will always be simple, and despite that fact that 22, A Million verges on crumbling apart multiple times, you will come back to it because the subtle melodies are able to provoke explosive sensations, because the atmosphere, in its brief time span, is encompassing.

Where “Skinny Love” was instantly hummable, “____45_____” refuses to settle into any kind of pattern, jumping between tuneless woodwinds and haphazard vocals. It’s a jarring and unexpected move, but all of it’s layered complexity at least turns heads and demands further attention.

All the Bon Iver albums sound like little self-contained islands, and this is the one that sounds the most like a fire ravaging through the greenery and growth of the previous two. Sit back and let the flames burn bright and beautiful.

As a Bon Iver release, 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.

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.

This would all be simply infuriating were it not for the melodiousness that binds these strange sounds and images together, the feeling stirred up by Vernon’s voice, and his gift for chord progressions that sweep you along almost against your will.

22, A Million occasionally confronts and challenges with its willful weirdness, but Bon Iver can still locate that lonely cabin, if only in spirit, when Vernon really wants to dig deep.

For all its undoubted oddness, what’s striking about the album is how straightforwardly enjoyable it is.

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.

It is the sound of a musician coming to terms with the excruciation of making art and exposing himself without armour.

There’s an intensely private quality about 22, A Million that makes it initially hard to penetrate. ... But as the album progresses, it becomes more accommodating.

Vernon remains an oblique lyricist, but the knottiness can be compelling.

Courageous, wilful, fractured and something of a triumph, 22, A Million will move you, though you may struggle to explain how, or why. [Nov 2016, p.87]

More often than not, musicians determined to avoid old tropes are exhausting. But 22, A Million stands out as Bon Iver’s finest moment yet, a cross between invention and beauty that’s delivered without compromise.

It’s the otherworldliness of 22, A Million that makes it soar.

These 10 songs feel bold, nourishing and emotionally resonant. [Nov 2016, p.34]

His most intricately affecting music yet. [Nov 2016, p.100]

The cracks, breaks, and flaws in Vernon's voice allow his humanity to shine through a little more. By saying less and embracing fragility, He sounds more vulnerable than ever.

It’s one of the year’s strangest albums, but some of the oddball arrangements work: On “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⊠ ⊠” Vernon fuses Chipmunk soul with a booming low end to chilling effect. Still, he’s at his strongest when he keeps his outré inclinations in check.

The results are, in many places, as ethereally and lustrously beautiful as the best Bon Iver material but more removed. ... Because this album travels in so many directions, there are places where Mr. Vernon sounds unanchored, and where his reluctance gives way to lack of commitment. His naïveté has always been carefully studied, but sometimes here, especially in the middle of the album, it feels just vague.

Oblique lyrics provide few hand-holds; while his distress is palpable, it remains frustratingly nondescript.