http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZYVJlhnqxQ There is a confluence of themes in this song that just de

There is a confluence of themes in this song that just destroys me. It’s an auto-tune dirge that does even more for the concept than Imogen Heap’s Hide and Seek, which was really, really significant to me when I listened to it. Here I think auto-tune is used similar to how Kanye West did in 808s and Heartbreak — not so much to cover that he can’t sing (which he can’t) but to imply a distancing from humanity. I always take repetition to mean insistence in music, and with only four phrases repeated, I interpret it as a bell connected to an alarm system no one can find anymore, let alone disconnect. In a story about being paralyzed at the precipice of some required action, Lovecraft wrote of the North Star twinkling: “[it] strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.”

I am a sap for dense harmonies; I made a hobby out of learning all the parts to a three-part harmony and here they come five, six, seven — too thick to dissect. By the end of the song Bon Iver has built a pleading, crystalline, snow-litten aural cathedral that is as real as any church I have been inside.