About 15 years ago, on a grim and rainswept Friday night, I went to some grimy bar in a godforsaken post-industrial town in the north of England to watch a couple of local bands ply what a cynical man might describe as their “trade”. I was accompanied by a co-worker of mine and his best friend, both of whom continuously slipped out during the gig in order to inject heroin in the carpark. When they returned, floaty and spaced out from having successfully caught the dragon, they delivered a series of rather catty takes on the “artists” up on stage purveying their dubious wares. I very distinctly remember that they described one of these acts, a melancholy, maudlin, guitar-strumming, professionally heartbroken singer from some Lancashire market town, as “music for people who wet the bed”.
“Music for bed-wetters” – the phrase has always stayed with me because it seems so apt to describe a lot of the acoustic guitar-wielding bands that emerged in the latter half of the 2000s, to narrate the travails of hipsterish, self-absorbed college students recently ditched by their girlfriends in favour of the right-back of the university football team. And there is no question that these reprehensible beasts of soppy middle-class solipsism, frightful bands with names like Fleet Foxes and Daughter, were first birthed by For Emma, Forever Ago, the debut album by Bon Iver and the fearful Angrboða of early 21st century indie-folk.
Everyone knows the mythology behind the album – it’s the chief reason why everyone loves it, after all, because it’s surely not down to the music. By late 2006, Justin Vernon, later the frontman of Bon Iver, had just been kicked out of his previous band, lost his job, been dumped by his girlfriend, and spent much of the previous months in bed with acute hepatitis and inflammation of the vagina. So, to “get away from it all”, he gathered up his instruments, retreated to his father’s hunting cabin in the frozen wastes of rural Wisconsin, and spent the winter alone with his thoughts and his acoustic guitar, contemplating suicide, writing For Emma Forever Ago and, presumably, having a lot of wanks.
There’s not much to say about the music. The album comprises a mercifully brief 37 minutes-worth of acoustic folk songs, written on some battered old guitar that Vernon bought online and which he perhaps believed would enhance the rustic, bearded, anti-modern authenticity of his songwriting. Distinguishing between the individual songs here is challenging – the entire album congeals into an unceasing cavalcade of four-minute folk numbers, to which listeners are invited to append adjectives like “fragile”, “tender,” and “heartfelt”. Some, like the opener “Flume”, sound more thoroughly resigned and defeated; others, like “Creature Fear”, are more “poignant”. Unexpectedly, and perhaps sacrilegiously, there are some nice, ethereal electronic touches, particularly on “Lump Sum”, which I suppose does successfully channel the deathly spirit of isolation that Vernon presumably experienced in the outback.
Lyrically, there’s even less to say, unless we are bidden to pretend that Vernon’s stream-of-consciousness gibberish really can be described as “cryptic” or “enigmatic”, as some eminently suggestible reviewers did at the time of the album’s release. “Only love is all maroon”, he nonsensically insists on the opening song “Flume” (which is not strictly true – what about the Heart of Midlothian home strip?), and such couplets set the tone for over half an hour of folk music in which the vocals and lyrics serve mainly as another instrument rather than endeavouring to deliver a message, even one as tired as “I’m a miserable 20-something male, and I’m too far from civilization to wash or change the bedsheets that I pissed in last night.”
And after all that, I have to admit that For Emma, Forever Ago is a decent enough album, by the standards of indie folk, which to me is an inherently boring and uninteresting genre. It’s an easy, suggestive listen, agreeable enough background music for a dark, isolated November night, and it even occasionally fires into life – on “Skinny Love”, where the flames of anger briefly flicker, and especially on the title track, a moment of authentically sad resolution with a nice trumpet solo. In the end, though, Bon Iver’s legions of fans love For Emma because of the mythology surrounding it – the solo artist retreating from civilization and plumbing the unknowable depths of his spiritual profundity and artistic genius to re-emerge having single-handedly effected a “watershed moment in indie-folk”. The girls love it, and for that reason, so do the boys, but if you want my opinion, the only water being shed here is the kind that discolours your bedsheets.
Overall: * * *
Standout track: “For Emma”