Hand That Pen Over To Me, Poetaster

Without further comment, the great Carl Wilson on Pitchfork’s Album of the Year (and Richard Bruckner):

Which brings me round, if only because you asked, to Bon Iver. I see the appeal of Justin Vernon’s traffic-stopping falsetto and deft arrangements, but I can’t handle the overbearing self-seriousness, which seems to obviate the need for the music to have any kind of forward momentum, melodically or rhythmically—his songs not only don’t go anywhere, they don’t seem to start out anywhere. The only tune on Bon Iver’s self-titled second album I can even listen all the way through is “Beth/Rest,” on which, like Jonah, I appreciate the nakedly cheesy, John-Hughes-credit-sequence vibe.

Vernon generally sings as if he’s afraid he might bruise a word by articulating it, so many listeners might miss how strained and awkward his poetry-class-stoner lyrics are. In interviews he has credited the influence of one of my favorite and most overlooked living songwriters, Richard Buckner. Unfortunately he mimics only the mannerisms—the elusiveness, not the resonance, of the wordplay. Between his mushmouthedness and his thesaurusisms, the songs end up, paradoxically, oozing excruciating sincerity but evading almost any discernible content. Buckner, by contrast, never shrinks from casting aspersions on all culprits in his songs’ emotional bloodbaths. I wish I could sit every Bon Iver fan down to listen to Buckner’s first album in five years, Our Blood—songs like “Escape” or “Confession,” for instance—so they could hear the difference.