22, A Million

First quick thoughts:

It just seems to me that Justin Vernon is not as good a songwriter as he was once, or was at one intense moment in his life. Bon Iver had a couple of good songs, but things were already falling into collections of musical ideas rather than songs. Holocene and Beth/Rest were good songs to me -- but 22, A Million may have missed the mark entirely, being miles away from the subtlety and unity of things like Re: Stacks, etc.

These aren't songs -- they're just collections of things that Vernon heard and thought sounded cool. And there is a lot of cool sound on this album. But it's oh so unsatisfying.

In fact, it's quite Kanye. The correlation between what's going on here and The Life of Pablo is strong to me, and I noticed it whilst listening.

I notice how the more I know an artist, it seems, the less I respect their work.... because I am able to see the thought process behind it. I noted in my Standard Model thinking that the goal is to remove the artist from the art. When I read the writing of a particular friend of mine, when I hear new Radiohead music, when I hear Justin Vernon try new ideas, I just get it. It makes so much sense, and is thus unimpressive to me.

There are cool sounds here, and maybe a decent song or two, and maybe a couple songs I'll listen to out of context sometime in my life. But I just get what he's doing, and it's not consistent, and it's not cohesive, and it's not like the startling beauty of earlier work.



Actually, to be clear, my issue is not with the diverse brigade of glitch noises and electro-ambience --- it's really that he tries to settle his weak folk-rock melodies and chords within. For Emma featured good folk melodies and chords -- since then, not only have these features worsened, he is trying to meld them with ideas that come from an entirely different place of inspiration. One cool folk melody and one cool glitch sample may not work together, though both are cool separately. His vision is fractured, and even inconsistent in its fracturing. His classic, traditional musical talent from the early years isn't present or is lost, and the weaker form of that is placed amongst just weird, disagreeable parts. Two bad things happening here.