EP Review: Bon Iver, Blood Bank

During 'Skinny Love', Justin Vernon- the ethereal double-tracked voice behind Bon Iver- told us to be patient. Yet less than a year on from his debut offering, the first green shoots of new material have surfaced from the bleak Wisconin winter sound that was 'For Emma', Forever Ago' in the form of 'Blood Bank'-a bold four track EP that will very likely divide opinion.
Gone are the low-fi, percussion-less, cabin created recordings; replaced instead with a full band backing and genuine post production. Even Vernon's distinctive vocals appear to have changed- the title track reveals his fragile falsetto voice vanishing in the opening lines- 'Well I met you at the blood bank, we were looking at the bags/Wondering if any of the colours matched any of the names we knew on the tags'- in favour of a grittier, harder sound only previously heard in parts of 'For Emma'. The second track ‘Beach Baby', meanwhile, complete as it is with a slide guitar, was never going to be placed amongst the previous album’s wintery folk landscape. Even so, as with so much of Vernon’s work, it remains near perfect lyrically-‘don’t you lock when you’re fleeing/ I’d like not to hear keys.’ In 'Babys' you can almost hear that remote Wisconin cabin’s snow thawing, through screams of 'summer comes to multiply!' and the uplifting 'Hoppipolla'-like use of a piano.
But it is with ‘Woods' that Vernon experiments most, and proves that all important versatility that was not necessarily evident before. 'I’m up in the woods/ I'm down on my mind’ is a refrain that belongs on 'For Emma', yet the closing track implausibly features those Marmite vocoder vocals that Mr. West spread all over his last album '808's and Heartbreak'. But incredibly it works. And if Vernon continues to experiment as he has here, its hard not to believe in life after 'Skinny Love.' 8/10