A reliable metric for measuring pop success is hard to find these days, as Michael Hann noted in these pages recently. Massaged figures for sales and streams are so opaque as to be almost meaningless. The charts are old news; social media reach wildly distorting. Bon Iver have won Grammys and released platinum-selling albums, but that was a decade ago. Such accolades feel oddly old–fashioned now.
Perhaps the most assured barometer is the traditional one of bums on seats – by which gauge Bon Iver appear to be doing just fine. Yes, they are a band lacking any semblance of a song your postman could whistle. And yes, they are fronted by Justin Vernon, a doggedly unstarry fortysomething in a rumpled T-shirt and headband.
Vernon wears chunky headphones throughout, for all the world like an off-duty lumberjack at a silent disco
But still. Roughly 10,000 bums are here tonight, by my reckoning, to witness Bon Iver bring a fresh twist to the choreographed arena experience. Here’s a band which understands that in the age of bedroom pop and headphone rock, you don’t always have to shout; the bold move is to sit back and let the audience inch towards you. The resulting experience isn’t so much immersive as compellingly internalised. It almost feels like each of us is privy to our own personal performance.
I first saw Bon Iver play in 2008, in a deconsecrated church in Edinburgh. Back then, the mood was snowbound Americana: bare-backed indie-folk songs, heavy on lamentation. In the ensuing 14 years, the medium by which Vernon delivers his work has radically shifted. Collaborations with Taylor Swift and Kanye West have made him pop and hip-hop literate. The songs remain soundly shipshape below the waterline, but up top they come decked out in hazy post-digital regalia, blending gospel, R&B (in the modern sense), soul, blues and rap, with a nicely disorientating glaze of experimental electronica.
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