I'm pretty excited at the moment. My immediate future has some milestone events in store. These, plus some plain good planning, sees some exceptionally good times in the pipeline and one of the first has lived more than pleasurably up to expectations. Bon Iver last night at the Hammersmith Apollo, a venue that already holds some nostalgic sentiment for me, could have done no wrong really, but having had the luck to have seen them previously (twice) when they played Glastonbury in 2009 I can safely say they are only getting better.
Their 2011 European tour sees a stage-full of multi-instrumentalists, an eclectic group of men who are clearly just as passionate about this unique sound as frontman, and resolute face of Bon Iver, Justin Vernon. I have fallen in love with Festivals but I am still to claim myself a prolific gig-goer. Despite this there was something about the atmosphere of the Apollo last night that felt different to other live music events; in the halting pauses between lines of unintelligible words and oft inhumane sounds emitting from the mouth of Justin Vernon the crowd was silent, transfixed, appreciative, slightly swaying. I've never seen anything like it. This, for the first 6 songs at least until a crazed and hypnotic saxophone solo threaded into Blood Bank and a significant portion of the audience went mad, shortly followed by a loud, maniacal and highly satisfying Creature Fear.
After the lyrics of Re:Stacks came to an end, and the band continued Vernon produced a camera and started filming the audience. Then in a familiar tack, before launching into Wolves, he asks the audience to include themselves with the evenings performance and join him for the emotional repetition of "what might have been lost", which, as it had in the middle of a field in Somerset, grew to an impressive crescendo, making it my favourite song.
The pleasure of last nights performance was that it was that, a performance, and it is this that made it better, musically, than their sets of two years ago. More developed material hasn't lost any of the original emotion infused into it by a wounded man during a self-imposed year of isolation, but much loved songs were turned into multi-layered sequences with styles at times of a big Jazz band, reminiscent of 80's music, and at others what could easily be incidental score music.
If you weren't there, live youtube video's will not do it justice, this is something close.
opener, Perth
my favourite, Wolves
en core, Skinny Love
