Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

Driven into the wildness by disillusionment and a little heartbreak, Justin Vernon holed himself up in an old log cabin, spending his days stocking the wood-burning stove and hunting for food to fuel him against the bleak Wisconsin winter which was setting in. With only his own voice of reason and the whisper of hibernating woodland to break the silence, something came to fill the void. That something proved to be spectacularly special: it was the collection of deep-set, beatific folk which makes up For Emma, Forever Ago. Recorded with a rickety collection of instruments, one guitar poetically repaired as a trade-off against some self-shot deer meat, and, for the most part, simply comprised of multi-tracked, falsetto vox, and an old acoustic, this is a recording as pure as the drifting snow which bedded its creator in, and a tender testament to a lonely soul crying into the darkness. [Paul Neeson]