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iTunes Session

  • Jagjaguwar

This crisp in-studio EP offers takes on selections from Bon Iver as well as a Björk cover. It hints at what that album might have sounded like with more traditional production, but raises some familiar questions about the purpose of such a release.

While writing about Pitchfork's No. 1 album of last year, Amanda Petrusich suggested Bon Iver might be the record that frees Justin Vernon from the "myth of Bon Iver." It did momentarily distract from the scruffy loner archetype of For Emma, Forever Ago, but the enormous size of the band he assembled to tour it led to new jokes about how alone he wasn't.

From the jump, it's clear that the group's just-released iTunes Session isn't meant as a substitute for that live experience. It's an EP, for one thing, and the in-studio format downplays invention. And it begins not with the explosive fanfare of "Perth", the song that opens Bon Iver and its attendant live shows but rather the closer, "Beth/Rest". It's a curious bit of sequencing until you realize it's actually the song that makes the best case for this particular format. This version puts more emphasis on "power" than "ballad": Vernon is a distinct singer and what comes across in Session's "Beth/Rest" is that he's a strong, gritty one as well. It's an underutilized look for him. The backbeat becomes equally resolute and steady as well, the percussion hitting with purpose rather than wafting like some box kites being knocked about in the wind. It frees the song from being a battleground for opinions about Bruce Hornsby. And it is the highlight.

As for the rest of the set, well, this is something like how Bon Iver might have come across with a more traditional approach to production. These aren't exact copies of what appeared on Bon Iver*,* but they're about as close as you can get. Just witness "Michicant": those seemingly tossed-off scuffs of reverbed guitars at the beginning are recreated verbatim and yes, someone remembered to bring the bicycle bell.  "Minnesota, WI" makes its dropped-octave harmonies stand out a bit more in this setting, but its tricky polyrhythms are otherwise impressively intact. "Hinnom, TX." and "Wash." sound professional as opposed to magical. But there's value in that, too, as the clarity allows the interlocking layers of keys, brass, and percussion to reveal themselves and prove above all else, Bon Iver was the creation of many very, very sophisticated musicians. But didn't you already know that?

There's no continuity here, no rarities outside of a lone cover, and nothing similar to the World Café performance of "Beth/Rest", which fundamentally altered the song into a barroom lurker in a way that justified its existence. Though "Holocene" appears in typically fine form, Bon Iver's most immediate crowd pleasers-- "Perth" and first single "Calgary"-- are excised in favor of its impressionist deep cuts in a setting that doesn't take advantage of their amorphous structures.

The EP ends with a spirited cover of Björk's "Who Is It?", where Vernon and the band whip around the tracks's hairpin turns enthusiastically, breathlessly. Coming at the end of six hyper-accurate selections from Bon Iver, whether "Who Is It?" does the original justice feels like the wrong question to ask. Justin Vernon is often a very funny, self-deprecating man who makes incredibly serious records, so it's mostly disappointing that iTunes Session doesn't take more chances. Which leads back to the same question that's met every iTunes Session thus far: "Who exactly is this for?"

If it's looking to capitalize on post-Grammy curiosity, it's a lazy sampler. All of Bon Iver's studio recordings can be considered essential for him as an artist and almost certainly for indie rock as a whole (particularly "Skinny Love" and "Woods"), and there’s not a single track from For Emma, Forever Ago or Blood Bank EP here. It doesn't even make sense for the penny-pinching Bon Iver fan: once again, it's not meant to be confused with Bon Iver: Live! and only a few dollars separates having what is essentially half of Bon Iver and owning the entire thing as it's meant to be heard. I suppose if Bon Iver's not coming to your town any time soon, and you were hella bummed out by his "SNL" performance, it might be worth the cost to know he can "pull it off" with capable aplomb. Beyond that, it's basically 60% of one of the decade's finest records, so it's more subject to triggering buyer's remorse than critical naysaying. iTunes Session isn't exactly useless-- it turned in decent surveys of bands like Wilco and the Decemberists, whose catalogs are sprawling and erratic.  But this one is mostly a consumer curiosity.

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