The life Justin Vernon lived over three months from November 2006 is begging for the Daniel Day-Lewis treatment, should the actor ever hear the story behind this 27-year-old’s near-perfect debut album. After the collapse of his band, Vernon – whose alias is a deliberate misspelling of bon hiver (‘good winter’ in French) – retreated to his father’s log cabin in the woods of Wisconsin. There, he lived in isolation and sub-zero temperatures, surviving off the deer he shot and butchered, along with the water and odd can of food his dad delivered every ten days. Hardly surprising, then, that Vernon should turn inward, but equally, his environment has stuck to this record like hoar frost encrusts a tree branch.
Vernon’s sound is not dissimilar to Iron & Wine’s, but his pellucid falsetto is from the soul/gospel, rather than the alt.country/nu-folk tradition and these nine songs are fleshed out (most notably on ‘The Wolves [Act I and II’]) with multi-tracked vocals – the perfect foil for Vernon’s finger-picked guitar, ghostly ambient noises and electronic texturing. His balancing of the lean and the lush, the enigmatic and the confessional is beyond reproach; wherever ‘Emma’ is now, she must be bowled over.
