Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Bon Iver were at the vanguard of the indie-folk boom of the late 2000s, just as the world economy turned to bust. That was when Fleet Foxes’s beatific roots-rock went platinum, Mumford & Sons started jangling their infernal banjos, and music writers toggled between the use of “rambunctious” and “hymnal” in effusive reviews.Looming over all that was Bon Iver’s debut, For Emma, Forever Ago, one of 2008’s most acclaimed albums. The band’s leader Justin Vernon made it during a solitary three-month winter retreat in a remote Wisconsin cabin where he nursed a broken heart, recuperated from ill-health, chopped wood, hunted deer and wrote songs. Bearded and plaid-shirted, possessed of an emotive high voice, he was both rugged backwoodsman and convalescent man of feeling. “Solace my game,” he sang cryptically, squinting through the crosshairs of his acoustic guitar for a more meaningful prey than deer.Almost 20 years after his storied rustication in the hunting cabin, Vernon, 43, is back with the fifth Bon Iver album. Sable, Fable (stylised with typical orthographic tricksiness as SABLE, fABLE) is billed as the “epilogue” to its four predecessors. The opening tracks, released in a standalone EP last year, return to the habitat of For Emma, Forever Ago. Guitar parts form a delicate play of light and shade against gloomy topics of self-betrayal and uncertainty. Then the songs shift to a more upbeat mode with impressionistic lyrics about love and acceptance.Rather than a picturesque back-story, the album arrives with broad-brush talk of anxiety and recovery. “I think there was a good 10 years where it felt like somebody had a boot on my chest from before I woke up until after I fell asleep,” Vernon told the New York Times recently. Fame was the reason for his unease. As early as the tour following their second album, 2011’s Bon Iver, he spoke about stepping away from his successful band.Fugazi, the ultra-principled hardcore punk group from Washington DC, are a beacon for him: their name is scrawled on his high-school electric guitar. Vernon’s allegiance to their ethos of not selling out is sincere. Unlike many so-called indie acts, he has remained signed to an independent label rather than jumping ship to a major. Yet he has also chosen to amplify his celebrity through collaborations with some of the biggest names in music. He guested on Taylor Swift’s albums Folklore and Evermore, the megastar’s version of indie folk. He also formed a close working relationship with Kanye West. In 2016, the rapper declared Vernon to be his “favourite living artist”. That year, Bon Iver released 22, A Million, whose computer-distorted vocals, glitchy electronic production and bizarre song titles bore the imprint of Kanye’s disruptive spirit. (This was before West embraced the furthest of far-right politics.)Sable, Fable’s theme of self-acceptance owes something to the rapper too. “Kanye speaks of how you have to love yourself. And believe in yourself,” Vernon told the Guardian in 2016. The first track of the new album, “Things Behind Things Behind Things”, finds him failing to heed the disgraced sage’s advice. The singer sees a “competitor” staring back at him from the mirror, his public self. “I can’t go through the motions,” he intones. Jangling acoustic guitars evoke the world of For Emma, Forever Ago. But Vernon withholds his yearning high voice in favour of a lower, grainier register. His crisis of confidence continues on “Speyside”, in which he describes himself scribbling fruitlessly in the pages of a notebook (“What a waste of wood”) amid an attractively sombre folk arrangement. Not until the fourth track, “Short Story”, do we encounter his celebrated falsetto. He sings of the sun shining in his eyes as music shimmers grandly around him. The darkness is banished.“Everything Is Peaceful Love” brings the album’s saccharine character to the fore. “And damn, if I’m not climbing up a tree right now,” Vernon sings repeatedly, stepping up the scale as he delivers the gauche phrase. “Walk Home” has a pitch-shifted vocal loop and chintzy keyboards, as though staging a battle between experimentalism and easy listening. “We can let the light come in,” Vernon croons. Chintz is the winner.A hazy portrait of a relationship emerges in the album’s second half. Complicated scenarios of give and take are given a slick adult-contemporary gloss. “Day One” is a modern gospel number with an imaginatively looped piano melody about making it through a rocky patch. “From” is Fleetwood Mac-style soft rock in which Vernon sings of wanting to lavishly kiss his lover “from ear to ear” even as he vows to be patient waiting for her to “just take my love in your time”.Haim’s Danielle Haim guests on the smoothly impassioned, meticulously arranged duet “If I Could Only Wait”, which peters out amid opaquely non-committal lyrics about commitment. A mawkish conclusion comes with the Coldplay-soundalike “There’s a Rhythmn” [sic]. Vernon, frustratingly ambivalent to the last, sings about letting love take its course. He finally finds the solace sought on For Emma, Forever Ago, but it proves an underwhelming achievement.★★☆☆☆‘Sable, Fable’ is released by Jagjaguwar
