Sydney Festival: Bon Iver review
Saturday 24 January, City Recital Hall
By Dan Rookwood
Emerging from Bon Iver at the City Recital Hall on Saturday night, I found myself thinking (not for the first time this month): there is nowhere better place in the world to be than in Sydney right now. It was one of the best gigs I've ever been to. I felt so uplifted, I genuinely wanted to cry.
As a general rule, I try not to get carried away by hype but there was a real buzz around Bon Iver last week and I soon realised that my tickets for Saturday's Sydney Festival show – their last of a year-long world tour – were the hottest in town. Bon Iver, Justin Vernon's latest incarnation, more than lived up to the billing.
I say "latest incarnation" like I've been following Vernon's career for years. I haven't. I'm a late adopter to this Midwesterner's folky falsetto. I didn't know much about him except that he'd written this album in three months while recovering from illness in an isolated log cabin. The first couple of listens on iTunes hadn't hooked me in, but I knew he was getting rave reviews – not least in The New Yorker earlier this month – so I thought I'd see what all the fuss was about.
Vernon is an odd-looking bloke: like the school nerd who became a lumberjack. He has an apologetic stoop, ruffled flannelette shirt, a My Name Is Earl geek-moustache and modest, disarming between-song patter that makes you want to go for a beer with him.
"I'd hate for you to think this was some kind of schtick," he said as he sincerely thanked the audience in a deep, easy-listenin' tone several octaves below his singing voice. "This is the end of an amazing year. It's incredible when all your dreams come true."
The album was largely a solo effort but for the last 12 months it has been brought to the stage by three fellow nerds who form a high-pitched choir behind Vernon's spellbinding lead vocal. They had 17 different instruments between them on an extremely cluttered garage of a stage – mostly guitars and types of drum – to take each song through the layers of simple melody through to rousing, chaotic cacophony before peeling back to hair-tingling purity again.
Listening again to the album as I write this, I can match song titles to the memory. I recall that the foot-stomp of 'Skinny Love', the haunting intimacy of 'Blindsided', the welling eyes during 'Re:Stacks'.
City Recital Hall is a superb venue and the entire audience was overwhelmed, hanging on every note and imploring an encore at the end. Vernon shyly obliged, returning with 'The Wolves Act 1 & 2' on the condition that the audience sing the loop "what might have been lost" in a rising crescendo before finally sending them back to Wisconsin with a loud and long standing ovation. Easily my highlight of Sydney Festival so far.
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