Bon Iiver – Sable, Fable: :: Ondarock reviews

When Justin Vernon played the role of Bon Iver for the first time, he had recently left the band Deyarmond Edison and was still metabolizing the end of a relationship. The transfer to the Wisconsin was therefore a first act of isolation in search of a dimension where to free yourself from pain.
Living of memories and self -pity has never been a priority for the American musician. Involved in various capacities in the Big Red Machine and in the Volcano Choir, Justin Vernon evolved the moniker of Bon Iver to a real group, developing an attitude of collaboration, and the experimentation of new musical languages, intercepting in this path musicians different from each other: Gayngs, Taylor Swift, Kanye West and St. Vincent.

The expectations of the fans of the first hour disregarded, the musician has been unable in the semantic revolution of electronics and technological seduction, and it is in this new dimension that abstractions, lacerations, solipsism and secular spirituality have exploded, disseminating new creative idioms that have attracted the attention also of many colleagues, the latter diligent in recognizing the bon Iver and Vernon in the current scenario.
In the meantime, the peculiarities of the music of the American artist have revealed themselves to become a real trademark – the falsetto halfway between soul singers and white voices, the guitar hovering between angular tones and crystalline reverbs, a writing where numerology and improvisation coexist – characterizing any artistic gesture, up to the stylistic deception of the EP that anticipated the release of the new album. “Sable, Fable”, published at five and a half years away from “I, i”.
Yes, I just said a deception of the “Sable” EP, a project that broke the silence and created the wait for this collection, which rumors of the corridor define as the last under the name Bon Iver. The traces of the EP placed at the head of the sequence are the closest to the acoustic fragility of the beginning. The solitary notes for guitar, violin and voice in falsetto of “Speyside” rekindle the narrative of “For Emma, ​​Forever Aug”, but Vernon is not focused on the stories to be told how much on the staging, on the power of the instrumental and vocal elements.

The compositions follow mechanisms that manipulate rhetoric and modernism with an authorship that impresses and resonates powerful as never before, despite “Sable, Fable” remains the most linear, simple and affable work of the author. The new light that guides Vernon's inspiration is the soul in its unstructured form and Psych-ADDICTED that Mkgee crystallized in the excellent “Two Star & The Dream Police”. Therefore, the presence of Michael Gordon (ie Mkgee) among the authors of the splendid “day one” is not surprising: a jagged flow of soul, R&B, gospel and electronic manipulations that rises to the model of a stylistic revolution that Vernon faces by modifying the boundaries of contemporary pop.

The essence of the new Bon Iver album, introduced by a short and inspired “short story” that gives way to pop-Soul, is therefore contained in the “Fable” section of “Everything Is Peaceful Love”, a song that the author has kept in the drawer for six years waiting to frame the attractiveness. Easy Listening with an adequate contour.
For a moment, the key to reading “Sable, Fable” appears clearer, the arrangements and sound intuitions become the strength of an album that passes from the Peter Gabriel of “So” (“Walk Home”) to the visionary R&B plots of Prince (“from”, “I'm be there”), emulating substance and aesthetics with sounds that work on several levels of use, From hi-fi home to streaming, underlining the modern alt-pop vision.

Freed from the cliché of folk singer Lonely, Justin Vernon no longer feels the need to confuse the waters with destructuring and attacks from the raw material, namely the Melody, “Sable, Fable” is the album of achieved maturity, the most complete puzzle of a new Toddgren lent to the world of the Electro-Soul (“If Only I Could Wait”). To put together Sable and Fable Vernon consecrates the renewal with a splendid “Award Season”, which definitively seals the past with one of the most inspired pages of the staff catalog of newly-folk confessions, for an admission of awareness that echoes throughout the album: “It is so difficult to explain, and the facts are strange, but do you know what will remain? Everything we created”.
It is up to “There's a Rhytmn” instead to thin out the fog and drag the fate of the bon Iver to light: “I had a house I knew, perhaps it is time to go, I could leave the snow behind me”. The beat that the times establishes the closure of the circle, the melody is familiar and full of references to the past (for a moment I thought of the last trace of the first album: “Re: Stacks”) but at the same time embraces present and future with an impetus that someone will seem joyful, to others futile, but that the most zealous will examine thoroughly, without obviously the evanes Revoir “.

16/04/2025