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Aug 13, 2019The singles have zing, the pacing is superb, and the back half is just as fun as the front. With i,i, you feel the whole last decade: the exploration, the lessons learned. i,i is a mature masterpiece and a stunning marriage of ambition and technique.
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Aug 12, 2019Bon Iver have imperceptibly moved from requesting close listening to requiring it, and i,i spins a mesmerising web of superficially insubstantial yet intensely majestic music. Listen closely and you can hear the language of pop being redrafted in real time.
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Aug 8, 2019Over 12 years the music Justin Vernon has created as Bon Iver has constantly changed, but that doesn’t mean the old sounds have been undone; they’ve been repurposed and reused, evolving into something different – but always as compelling as the Bon Iver of yesteryear.
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Aug 8, 2019A decade on from the pained remoteness of For Emma, Forever Ago, i,i holds the same intimacy and urgency, elevated by years of groundbreaking experimentation.
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Aug 8, 2019i,i, feels as confident as anything he’s ever done: a dense, richly layered showcase for his continued aversion to the standard rules of grammar and the deepening of his defiantly uncommercial sound.
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UncutAug 15, 2019As stylistically adventurous and technologically innovative as the album is, this community of musicians ensures it remains accessible and soulful. [Oct 2019, p.24]
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Aug 13, 2019An ambitious but interior new sound. On i,i, Bon Iver’s expanding universe feels at once new and familiar. ... Vernon is still the dominant creative force, but on i,i, he steps confidently into the role of curator and conductor (an approach he may have adopted from his work with Kanye West). The result of this collective energy is an album that’s both frank and easygoing, reveling in the magic of close personal relationships.
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Aug 12, 2019Even as Vernon and his cast of thousands get further and further from the relatively simple, backwoods folkie sound that originally brought him to the forefront, he is making music that, far from being strange, is actually as inviting as anything he has ever done.
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Aug 12, 2019It's rich and endlessly rewarding. i,i brings together Justin Vernon's evolving, career-spanning vision for Bon Iver into one satisfying, defining work.
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Sep 3, 2019Some will no doubt ponder why it takes a village to make a record that feels far more isolated than communal, but the overall effect of “i,i” is not that of a disaffected wall of sound. Neither is it meant to be Vernon’s “happy” record, though such reductive distinctions are rarely an accurate portrayal of an album’s true intent. Instead, it’s wild and fragmented, as nature intended.
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Aug 9, 2019Vernon himself sings with more texture and conviction than ever before. He’s shifted fully from vessel to commander, steering the music instead of seeping into it.
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Aug 12, 2019Truth is, none of that intimacy [in For Emma] has gone, just the direction it's flowing has changed. Bon Iver today has traded that one-to-one, man-to-listener intimacy for the many-to-many intimacy shared between Vernon's circle of collaborators.
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Oct 1, 2019It’s comprised largely of several years of demos and “field recordings” and collected samples and experiments and improvisations. Perhaps that’s why it feels so novel at the precipice of a new decade; after 10(+) years of failed political experiments and improvisations, here’s a new songbook stripped of the arrogance and pretense of capitalist evangelism.
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Sep 4, 2019If 22, A Million could come off as sometimes cold and always anxious, then i,i is the warm flipside, with songs that float and flutter, that call for resilience rather than resignation. ... This record finds power in its collaborations.
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Aug 28, 2019Each song on “i,i” is an intricate, labyrinthine, multilayered construction. But the marvel of Bon Iver is how fragile and conditional each song seems; not monumental but precarious and permeable, susceptible to chance or whim or fate. All the planning creates music that feels as impermanent, and illuminating, as a sunbeam.
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Q MagazineAug 27, 2019Vernon is an expert curator of his emotions, even if i,i needs to let a little more air in under the glass at times. [Oct 2019, p.110]
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MojoAug 20, 2019i,i never sounds less than excellent, with wide-open acoustic/electric audio structures allowing pizzicato strings to waft through and rising clouds of horns to blow in unexpectedly. It really is bleeding edge stuff. [Oct 2019, p.90]
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Aug 19, 2019The album seems to suggest that Bon Iver is transitioning from a band in the traditional sense of the word into a looser collective. Despite the album’s intense pessimism and anxiety, Bon Iver’s organization speaks to the power of forging a community to battle back against darkness.
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Aug 16, 2019Those more straightahead tunes hint a sonically-reduced winter could be coming, but right now bask in i,i’s deep autumnal glow.
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Aug 8, 2019There is a tangible sense of joy in performance, although with no greater clarity of lyrical expression. ... His own work remains wilfully obscurantist, emotionally open and lyrically closed, as deep and meaningless as listeners are prepared to let it become.
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Aug 8, 2019This is a sound of a warm, human futurism. A record that feels impressionistic and abstract, dominated more by feeling than theme. Heavy sounds deployed deftly. Sometimes it feels a little fragmented (like on the slightly off-kilter swagger of ‘We’).
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Sep 3, 2019For the first time here, his ideas haven’t quite formed into a cohesive whole. All the other records felt complete works, this feels more like a collection. For all that really works on i,i, there are moments that feel unnecessary or out of place.
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Aug 14, 2019He's always taking a big swing. That alone is worth celebrating, but when he hits the mix right on i,i, all of these high-minded thoughts go out the window, and Bon Iver rises to something truly inspiring.
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Aug 14, 2019Of course, at the core of all Vernon’s albums are potent songs, branded with his magnificently swooning melodic sensibility and gorgeous singing. This set has a few of those songs.
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Aug 12, 2019Vernon’s comments are crucial to divining his meaning in lyrics that can still tend toward the almost comically opaque. ... But the music on “i,i” bolsters this newly outward-looking sense; it’s far more spacious than the hushed acoustic laments of “For Emma, Forever Ago” or the cloistered electro-folk sound of the group’s last album, 2016’s “22, A Million.”
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Aug 8, 2019This is an album that you can feel as well as experience, perhaps the most complete Bon Iver album to date. Justin Vernon’s emotive approach to the album balances the individual and the communal with perfect precision. With a firmer grasp on reality and a new and brighter perspective, a unique mix of creativity and bewilderment remains at the core of Bon Iver.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 139 out of 170
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Mixed: 17 out of 170
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Negative: 14 out of 170
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Aug 9, 2019This album is out of our world. Beautiful, well structured with gorgeous sound.
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Aug 15, 2019Bon Iver tried to color the landscape with glitchy, staggering and minimal storytelling once again.
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Aug 14, 2019