2009 Awards: Album*

"That is the great power of the artist ... to paint something which we ordinary people feel but cannot reveal."
- Eleanor Roosevelt

In a pretty strong year for albums it seems strange to give a made-up award to something that technically qualifies as an EP, but I think this EP so completely adheres to my musical checklist that I cannot overlook it.

Ladies and gentlemen, your 2009 "Album of the Year":

Bon Iver, Blood Bank

Blood Bank is, in many ways, a simple project: it's only four songs, it runs barely over 15 minutes, and the whole EP basically consists of one musician, Justin Vernon, writing and performing everything. And yet, the results are remarkable--intensely personal, raw, haunting, uninhibited, candid. Each song speaks a volume, each distinct from the one before it, its own season in its hazy, mellifluous year.

Like I mentioned earlier in my Sigur Rós post, I have respect for and am drawn to those musicians which I feel (perhaps justified or not) are allowing themselves no privacy in their music. That is, not to just unambiguously share lyrically the worst things that have happened to them, but to identify a precise feeling they have, some small or large slice of their human experience, and somehow translate that into music that recreates that feeling for the listener.

Music that accomplishes this controls the situation. One might think it's easy to create a fun song to dance to, and, in some ways, relatively, it is; but, what it is far more challenging to do is write a song that makes people dance, one that compels and commands them, and gets even the wettest of blankets out of their chairs. Similarly, it's easy for artists to write music for the listener to pity himself to, one that the listener plays when he's lonely. It's another thing entirely to write a song that makes the listener lonely or, at least, conveys so devastatingly the loneliness of the singer/musicians that the listener cannot help but feel empathy and be thankful that the listener might not be lonely himself.

It is here that Blood Bank succeeds so wildly.* Here is a crop of songs that is vulnerable and truthful from the opening bar, every song building its own ethereal, complete atmosphere. They are as follows:

*In the interest of full disclosure, I will state that I obtained Bon Iver's Blood Bank (2009) and the even more staggering For Emma, Forever Ago (2008) at the same time and inextricably linked the two, such that my love for both cannot be fully divided into discrete chambers. As this is the case, my fondness for Blood Bank may be artificially augmented and I cannot say that one unfamiliar with Bon Iver can go buy Blood Bank and be able to replicate my experience (of course, this is always the case). If you don't have either, get both; if you have one, get the other; if you have both, congratulations, have a cookie.

"Well, I met you at the blood bank. We were looking at the bags. Wondering if any of the colors, matched any of the names we knew on the tags."

Track 1, "Blood Bank"*: This song begins with a rolling in of ghostly backing voices, melting over a solo electric guitar. The lyrics come in, double tracked (at least) with a clear tenor and a wistful falsetto combining to create this eerie yet beautiful delay-type effect. The choruses break in this beautiful way that opens the song up, at first slightly abandoning the pulse of the song, before the pulse returns to ground the song from seemingly floating away.

At points it seems a very standard love song ("I'm in love with your honor, I'm in love with your cheeks") but the mood of the song is so intense (not a loud, aggressive intense, an unadulterated, pure intense) that some acknowledgment of love seems the only subject strong enough to warrant the passion. The lyrics skirt along the edge of interpretability, giving us tangible scenes of considering mortality while gazing at their literal lifeblood or a late night in a cold, parked car, feeling like the only two people on earth; but also touching on larger yet more abstract concepts like the magnetic pull of familial ties, the surreal passage of time, knowing that the newness of your experience is not in the slightest way also new to humanity yet still feeling that you own this "secret" and know about some corner of existence that others do not. Maybe I'm extrapolating too much, but each of those slivers is in there somewhere much in this same way this night that Vernon paints was/is in reality/fiction an amalgam of emotion and wondering.

* None of these links are to official music videos, but you can at least hear (most of) the songs.

"But don't you lock when you're fleeing, I'd like not to hear keys."

Track 2, "Beach Baby": This song is the most delicate and easily the shortest--just a fragile acoustic guitar and soft, falsetto vocals (still double tracked?), eventually giving way to a sublime pedal guitar melody before fading out. This feels like the kind of song that could only be appreciated in dead silence, maybe by a lone candle in a cabin. Lyrically, it's in some sense the bleakest of the bunch, a gentle yet painful acceptance of an inevitable end. Where the title track is sweeping and grand, "Beach Baby" is small in scale but laser-like in its focus; it's a break-up song, but it's so forgiving, asking only to be left with this one, wonderful memory on some unnamed beach. The pedal guitar at the end is gorgeous, sliding on some notes and pulling off of the others. I imagine a camera rising slowly off of him, as he recalls this encounter that no one can touch, into a shot of the array of stars over a dense, dark forest.

"Summer comes to multiply. To multiply."

Track 3, "Babys": This song, while still sparse like the others, is the fullest in regard to instrumentation. It begins with an almost arrythmic piano figure, drifting into the now familiar falsetto vocals, this time present with a sense of renewal and optimism (e.g. the new summer). I feel the title must relate back to the previous track, indicating some ability to move-on and refresh (i.e. there are other fish/babies in the sea). The chorus (if one can identify it as that, it happens just once) is perhaps the most stunning moment on the whole EP, when the declaration (though it's almost impossible to hear what he's saying) of "My woman and I, my woman and I, know what we're for," lands perfectly with a bass note and chord on the piano. This amazing crash is given a moment to echo and stretch out, before the tinkling of the piano figure returns and the song moves on its way again.

"I'm up in the woods. I'm down on my mind."

Track 4, "Woods": This is the big surprise of the album, devoid of instruments and suddenly including auto-tune and probably other voice modulators. It repeats the same phrase over and over, adding new voices, including some nearly screeching falsetto. This is my least favorite of the tracks, though when examining the EP as a whole it provides some counterpoint as well as finality to the project. That is, it has to go at the end and a song in the vein of the previous three would be isolated were it to follow this one. It reminds me more of a "Fitter, Happier" or "Revolution 9" type song, though more inherently musical than either of those two. I suppose it's a testament to Bon Iver that a fourth of the EP is this song and I still tossed it my prestigious "Album of the Year" honor.

In conclusion...

It was a close race and I wanted to get into how great I thought Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavillion was but this post ended up being a lot longer than I anticipated and I think maybe they deserve their own dissection, maybe as 2009's "Band of the Year" as they also released a great EP, Fall Be Kind, and jumped a few levels in the public eye. Ultimately though, as incredible as that Animal Collective record was, I wanted to recognize/discuss how poignant I found Blood Bank to be. Of all the albums that came out this year, I listened to Blood Bank the most, perhaps the simplest and truest test of a record's effectiveness, and I imagine I'll still be listening to it next year, in ten years, and in twenty.

Happy New Year. I'll be back in 2010 with (probably) some posts on Animal Collective, why I didn't really like Avatar, why I was pleasantly surprised by Julie and Julia, why Billy Corgan is allegedly (i.e. Jessica Simpson) sullying his reputation as an artist, and so on.

Cheers.