The Singles Jukebox

Perhaps the least frustratingly titled song from the new record…

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[5.70]

Gin Hart: Not sure this isn’t a remix of today’s Kanye, but I’m feeling a general nothing all over again. 
[5]

Katie Gill: Bon Iver’s been hanging out with Kanye too much. It seems some of Kanye’s gratuitous ~artsiness~ for the sake of artsiness and not for the sake of actual coherent music has rubbed off. Really, the best part about this three minute ode to pretentiousness is the inevitable joke about his “I would have walked across a thousand lands” lyric.
[1]

Alfred Soto: Singing “I’ll be happy as hell if you stay for tea” in a falsetto and over a piano line has to count among the most absurd, genteel, and predictable entreaties in modern music; it’s like listening to a Joe Biden speech for the “literally”s. Munchkin vocals, drums a-clatter, echo — you know the deal. Maybe the Christian-inflected title is his idea of a joke. I’m laughing.
[4]

Will Adams: One could plot Bon Iver’s sonic progression with a simple linear function. Vernon’s once stark falsetto became adorned with pitch correction software, and now it’s got that plus background chatter. “33 ‘GOD'” isn’t a far cry from “Perth,” but damn if it isn’t a solid use of that expansive, slow-build dynamic that’s my weakness.
[6]

A.J. Cohn: Vernon used to pair enigmatic lyrics with comparatively simple folk arrangements to evocative effect. Now, his music and lyrics match in form and content–here coming together as a cryptic collage of fragments of images and musical motifs. The track is over-ambitious and stretches itself rather thin, so to speak, but in that it has a gauzy kind of beauty.
[7]

Thomas Inskeep: The lyrics read like a poem from last week’s New Yorker, save for lyrics spliced in from Jim Ed Brown and Paolo Nutini; the music starts out largely around a piano riff before layers upon layers of atmosphere come in along with a drum track. This feels like Justin Vernon learned plenty from spending time in the studio with Kanye, only he took West’s tricks in his own direction. If Beck listened to less funk and folk and more, I dunno, King Crimson, he might end up adjacent to this ballpark.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: After six years hanging out with the folks at G.O.O.D Music, Justin Vernon is back, and he’s brought… drums? Bon Iver found longevity after the seemingly singular For Emma, Forever Ago by transforming snowdrifted ruin-folk into a shimmering synth bauble on his self-titled: it worked on both occasions because the fragility of the sound seemed to unfurl naturally from the fragility of the emotion. There’s less new on this new single, which has Vernon running through the 33 with his woes or something: like on Bon Iver, his enervated synths intertwine with a voice that wavers with sorrow and electronic affect. I make out references to chain hotels and apartment driveways, but nothing to suggest the blizzard hides anything but further inscrutability. If the album finds more to do with that low end, perhaps I’ll recant.
[5]

Ryo Miyauchi: Once mythologized as a cabin man who tried to find himself in the vastness of nature, Justin Vernon now soul-searches in scenes of a crowded city: hotels, apartments, late-night streets while calling a cab. His dwelling here resembles urban decay too, with him embracing distortion and brutish textures, really letting that neck-of-the-woods fantasy of his self-titled album crumble. Maybe his buddy Kanye got him to keep getting a little dirty, but he’s more of an asshole as he hits his high notes. I like this “No More Mr. Nice Guy” Bon Iver.
[6]

Anthony Easton: What Bon Iver does with Auto-Tune as a kind of absorption of a post hip-hop mark of authenticity is made even more interesting when you think of it as an ironic theological position. Nothing can be known, only the fake is real, and the piano ballad functions as a deconstruction of form. Who would think that Bon Iver would be as hip as Frank Ocean or Chance or Kendrick? Who would think that he didn’t really forget to make a pop song, and be maybe the best pop song writer of the bunch? Who would think that Kanye would make him do his best work, and maybe by extension, vice versa? Who would think that this didn’t mean he wasn’t ambitious in his own way?
[8]

Brad Shoup: I haven’t been inside that many hotel rooms, so they still feel like thresholds, or maybe starting blocks: I charge in the deep cold and fold my clothes in the light. There is a romance here, and a funny show of impatience with someone’s sister. But the background babble and cozy crackling drums form the kind of roadside enclosure in which I’m usually alone. At the end, he gropes at Sunday morning; after all, it’s time to get going. We work tomorrow.
[8]