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NOSTALGIA PICK #1: "For Emma, Forever Ago" by Bon Iver

   Isolation is a strange thing; it can point you towards things about yourself that otherwise might have been hard to find, and can also be completely maddening to the point of self-destruction. For some there is a yearning for being alone that can only be truly relieved on the odd occasion, and when it is it gives way to a security and peacefulness that only true solitude can bring forth. Bon Iver's debut full length For Emma, Forever Ago was born out of this isolation, when musical mastermind Justin Vernon ventured out to his father's cabin in the woods one winter to be alone. This story surrounding the album and its creation has been romanticised somewhat over time, but he entered with no intention of making an album, and emerged with one of the most intensely intimate and haunting collections of songs you will ever hear on record.
   You can almost feel the setting of these songs; every creak and groan of the cabin, the frosty windows, the smell of firewood - the sparse instrumentation and the lo-fi recording style adds to this atmosphere. You really feel like for the most part you're sitting in front of a man and his guitar as his whole world falls to pieces around him. When the floor does drop out from beneath the instrumentation (hinting at what was to come in the next Bon Iver album) it briefly reveals a whole new world of colour and life before it is covered over again, like a momentary lapse in Justin's ability to hold it all together.
   That is for me the most remarkable thing about this album; it is an exercise in restraint and suppression, and you learn just about as much from what isn't said than from what is. It is kind of like a slow leak of jumbled and confused thoughts that are pieces of a wider, more melancholy picture of loss and grief. Vernon never intended to reveal exactly what his universe looked like at this time; it is up to the listener to imagine exactly what that looks like in it's fullness. I think that is one reason so many people including me hold this album so close, because it is so easy to fit these jaded, broken and worn out puzzle pieces into our own lives and get such a painfully accurate reflection out of them. While pulling out his own insides to see what's left, Vernon has produced something that is immediately personal and heartbreaking for so many different people, and that is why it is always way up towards the pointy end of any inherently unanswerable "best albums" lists of mine.
   Where so many "sad albums" get caught in the mire of self-pity to the point of wankery, by the end of For Emma Vernon is more concerned with how he can begin to move on, having learnt and hurt from his past and sifting through what went wrong. On the album closer "Re: Stacks" he realises that "this is not the sound of a new man or crispy realisation; it's the sound of the unlocking and lift away." Where he ends up doesn't really matter, but we know that he learns to carry his past with him, safe and locked away, instead of staying anchored down amongst the ghosts and demons that surround it.
   If you haven't already heard For Emma, Forever Ago then I would be glad to point you towards it for the first time. It is seriously good.
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