33 "GOD"

Just Go With It

33 "GOD" by Bon Iver

Recommended by Kim

"The hype is real. I haven't been this excited for an album drop in a while. Comin' to y'all September 30th!"

The first official release for Bon Iver's most recently announced album, 33 "God" is a wild ride.

Highsnobiety commented that it sounds more like Bon Iver's collab work with Kanye than his old stuff, and I'm on board. I think it still has that far-away sound that I associate with Bon Iver, both in the instrumentation and the vocals, but it also has an experimental vibe that I've come to associate with Kanye.

Not that I'm super well-versed in the repertoire of either artist.

Anyway, you can hear a wide array of instruments and noises if you focus, but they all blend together so it's not distracting if you want to look at it as a whole. It's like...aural Monet.

I don't know.

Also I never really know how to address Bon Iver's lyrics, but they interest me enough that I always feel I should discuss them. I found a really great quote that Pitchfork took from John Ashbery, who was originally writing about Gertrude Stein:

Her lines were "annoying or brilliant or tedious." Stein was prone to stopping short in the middle of a sentence to wander the waking world. Her lines kept you at arm's length. (source)

And that's how I feel about Bon Iver lyrics. Especially the "annoying or brilliant or tedious." Which is it? Does it matter? I mean, many songs literally create verses out of the same words like oh, yeah, baby, na na na.

Maybe Bon Iver was like, "If I'm going to be saying nothing, I might as well say it with bigger words."

Or maybe it's personal poetry that I'm not grasping from an arm's length away.

The lyric video certainly looks like modern poetry, the text flowing in a form suited to print and paper with seemingly random capitalization and italics and enjambment. It's kind of fun to look at it like that. Man, I love lyric videos.

Overview:

Genre:
Alternative

Favorite Lyrics:
I'd be happy as hell
if you stayed for tea.

Verdict:
homework music