I have been going through a certain kind of reckoning with my previous self and the things that I loved back when I was an undergrad with fewer things on my mind and more time to listen to music — and even more importantly, more time to spend being the person who has listened to music. I blame the new Blind Pilot album — the idea that my favorite band could record an album that I didn't even find disagreeable, but just supremely forgettable, has me in a constant state of mild panic that the couture indie band that I had made my cause célèbre for some random spring semester turned out, in fact, not to be an important part of my personal tapestry, but yet another 7.4 on Pitchfork to be lost like so many tears in the rain.

And I say all this as preface for the zag, which is Bon Iver was and is not one of those artists. I did not like a lot of his post self-titled output because I felt then, as I felt now, that trying to achieve some sort of post-modernism via funny Unicode song titles felt like a cheap and disingenuine way out of whatever he was trying to negotiate with himself. But those first two albums are absolutely above reproach! For Emma, Forever Ago, far from being dated, feels more timeless now than it did when I first listened to it. And it has the double pleasure of taking me not just to the same cabin Justin Vernon sat in all those winters ago, but the cabins, metaphorical and otherwise, that I was in as I listened to it as that bright-eyed and bushy-tailed undergrad, hoping more than anything that I would be able to get a PBR without getting caught.

(You could probably spin all of that into a single narrative, which is Justin Vernon recognizing himself as being the For Emma guy and spending a decade trying to escape it, as if escaping the pigeonhole he created for himself would also help him escape the conditions that brought him his fame: an angel's voice and a shattered heart.)

It is perhaps overthinking it to call this album an extended reckoning, but it's also — despite the annoyingly ironic capitalization in the title — a very earnest record, bordering, if not infringing, on 80s dad rock at times, in a way that doesn't feel like cosplay but feels like the turn Vampire Weekend made with Father of the Bride — a new kind of music that represents neither stagnation nor escape, but a logical progression. And so many of its songs — If Only I Could Wait, There's a Rhythm — are great in the same way Holocene was great: an instant recognition that it would stick with you for a decade, and maybe longer still.

★★★★★