There are already enough "sensitive guy with a
guitar" albums to supply each of the nation's coffeehouses with its very own
profoundly sad, stylishly rumpled soundtrack. But Wisconsin singer-songwriter
Justin Vernon, who records as Bon Iver (a bastardized version of the French
phrase for "good winter"), still manages to put his own stamp on a moribund
genre with his quietly startling debut, For Emma, Forever Ago. The album evocatively
conjures the loneliness of a long northern winter, placing Vernon's lovely
songs in a distant, blurred vacuum of physical and emotional isolation. In
other words, the dude sounds alone, and songs like "Skinny Love" and the striking
album-closer "Re: Stacks" are constructed like intimately pained sighs,
delivered in a chilling falsetto and haunted by Vernon's ghostly backing
vocals. The power is in how these songs sound rather than what the opaque
lyrics don't quite spell out, perhaps because some things are just too tough to
say.