(pair of mirrors)

#1. Bon Iver - Bon Iver 

“Michicant” 

The year 2011 produced a perfect album.

Bon Iver is the artist whose legacy with outlive us all. Years from now, he will be up there with Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Nick Drake. Bon Iver is the ultimate modern songwriter – he is at once cryptic, passionate, complicated, versatile, and profound.

The most incredible thing of all is that in 2011 Bon Iver resisted the urge to remain Bon Iver. The songs from his 2008 debut For Emma, Forever Ago, in light of this year’s self-titled release, seem infinitely dwarfed. Before 2011, I would classify as quintessential Bon Iver songs like “Skinny Love” and “Re: Stacks”. These songs from For Emma were gritty, guitar-ridden spectacles of a broken heart. They were painful and sometimes even unbearable. Justin Vernon’s sadness on those songs was infectious and overwhelming, but the music itself, while in many ways very creative, was nowhere near this year’s Bon Iver.

Bon Iver is not an album about love – it’s an album about life. That is the biggest difference from 2008’s For Emma. Sometimes Bon Iver isabout the nostalgia and the sadness of life, but at the same time it’s about the power that can be drawn from those moments. There are lines on Bon Iver that can be interpreted in a million different ways – “I can see for miles and miles and miles,” for instance, or “and at once I knew, I was not magnificent”. It’s a kind of album that seems enchanted and dreamlike – the way it transitions from movement to stillness, from silence to sound. Every single song on Bon Iver contains an infinite number of layers. Every time you listen to the songs, you feel like you’ve peeled back one more layer, you feel like you’re that much closer to the very heart of Vernon’s voice, and to its meaning.

If I could describe Bon Iver in one sentence it would be that the album is the very manifestation of a living, breathing, human being’ soul. It’s the brain, the heart, and the body combined, within one devastatingly perfect 40-minute package.

-L