BON IVER - SABLE, fABLE

When Justin Vernon first donned the guise of Bon Iver, he had only recently left the band DeYarmond Edison and was still processing the end of a relationship. The move to Wisconsin was thus a first act of isolation, a search for a space in which to free himself from the pain.

Living on memories and self-pity has never really been a priority for the American musician, though. Variously involved with Big Red Machine and Volcano Choir, Vernon has evolved the Bon Iver moniker into a proper band, developing a taste for collaboration and the exploration of new musical languages, and along the way crossing paths with a wildly varied cast of musicians: Gayngs, Taylor Swift, Kanye West and St. Vincent.

Defying the expectations of early fans, the American musician plunged headlong into the semantic revolution of electronics and technological seduction, and it's in this new dimension that abstraction, laceration, solipsism and secular spirituality have exploded, scattering new creative idioms that have also caught the attention of many peers — peers who have, if anything, been quicker than critics to recognize the substantial role that Bon Iver and Vernon play in today's landscape.

In the meantime, the distinguishing traits of the American artist's music have become ever clearer, turning into a genuine trademark — the falsetto poised somewhere between soul singers and choirboy purity, the guitar balanced between jagged edges and crystalline reverb, a songwriting style where numerology and improvisation coexist — shaping every artistic gesture, right down to the stylistic sleight of hand of the Ep that preceded the release of the new album "SABLE, fABLE", arriving a full five and a half years after "I, I".

Yes, I did call the Ep "SABLE" a sleight of hand — a project that broke the silence and built anticipation for this collection, which rumor has it is the last to appear under the Bon Iver name. The tracks from the Ep placed at the head of the sequence are the ones closest to the acoustic fragility of the early days. The solitary guitar, violin and falsetto voice of "SPEYSIDE" rekindle the storytelling of "For Emma, Forever Ago", but Vernon isn't focused on the stories being told so much as on the staging, on the sheer power of the instrumental and vocal elements.

The compositions follow mechanisms that manipulate rhetoric and modernism with an authorial voice that impresses and resonates more powerfully than ever, even though "SABLE, fABLE" remains the most linear, straightforward and approachable work in his catalogue. The new light guiding Vernon's inspiration is soul in its deconstructed, psych-addicted form, the kind that MkGee crystallized on the excellent "Two Star & The Dream Police". So it's no surprise to find Michael Gordon (aka MkGee) among the writers of the gorgeous "Day One": a jagged flow of soul, r&b, gospel and electronic manipulation that stands as a model for a stylistic revolution Vernon pursues by redrawing the boundaries of contemporary pop.

The essence of the new Bon Iver album is thus contained in the "fABLE" section, opened by a brief, inspired "Short Story" that gives way to the unusually outgoing pop-soul of "Everything Is Peaceful Love", a track the artist kept in a drawer for six years while waiting to frame its easy-listening charm with the right setting.

For a moment, the key to reading "SABLE, fABLE" seems clearer, as the arrangements and sonic intuitions become the real strength of an album that moves from the Peter Gabriel of "So" ("Walk Home") to the visionary r&b textures of Prince ("From", "I'll Be There"), echoing both their substance and their aesthetic with sounds that work on multiple levels of listening, from the home hi-fi to streaming, underscoring a thoroughly modern alt-pop vision.

Freed from the cliché of the solitary folksinger, Justin Vernon no longer feels the need to muddy the waters by deconstructing and assaulting his raw material, namely melody. "SABLE,fABLE" is the album of hard-won maturity, the most complete puzzle piece yet from a latter-day Todd Rundgren on loan to the world of electro-soul ("If Only I Could Wait"). In bringing together sable and fable, Vernon seals his renewal with a splendid "Award Season", which definitively closes the book on the past with one of the most inspired entries in his personal catalogue of neo-folk confessions, an admission of self-awareness that echoes throughout the album: "It's so hard to explain, and the facts are strange, but you know what will remain? Everything we made".

It falls to "There's A Rhytmn", instead, to clear the fog and drag Bon Iver's fate from darkness into light: "I had a home that I knew, maybe it's time to go, I could leave the snow behind". The beat driving the song seals the circle shut, the melody is familiar and full of echoes of the past (for a moment I thought of the closing track on the first album, "Re:Stacks"), yet at the same time it embraces both present and future with a momentum that some will find joyous, others trivial, but that the most devoted will pore over carefully, not forgetting, of course, the hazy closing two minutes titled "Au Revoir".

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16/04/2025