For Justin Vernon, the road back to Manchester has been anything but straightforward. When he last headlined this venue, almost a decade ago in November of 2012, his success story was already an unlikely one; the making of his 2007 debut album, which saw him retreat to a remote cabin in his native Wisconsin to pick through the ruins of a failed relationship, became the stuff of indie legend, and when he expanded the sound on the sweeping, atmospheric Bon Iver, Bon Iver in 2011, he similarly broadened his fanbase, bringing mellow indie folk to the least likely of surrounds - cavernous arenas and massive festival stages.
It certainly seems as if Vernon took his ascension to this size of room as vindication of his bolder creative choices; in the ten years since he was last in town, he has confounded expectations at every turn, collaborating with royalty in the worlds of pop, hip hop and indie rock (Taylor Swift, Kanye West and The National, respectively) and producing a third album, 22, A Million , that seemed wilfully oblique, in everything from its sharp left turn into glitchy electronica to the near-impenetrable stylisation of its track listing (song titles included ‘10 d E A T h b R E a s T’ and ‘21 M◊◊N WATER’).
He even chose to eschew bigger cities on that record’s UK tour, joking from the stage at Blackpool’s Opera House in 2017 that travelling fans from Manchester far outnumbered the locals.
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Tonight, there’s no need for a trip out to the coast, with Vernon finally arriving back in the north west for a show originally scheduled for April of 2020, before the pandemic intervened. He brings with him a slew of tracks from what remains his latest album, 2019’s i, i , an experimental ramble further down the path of folktronica. Like that record, tonight’s show finds room for both maximalism befitting the massive stage - there’s something quietly biblical about early numbers like opener ‘Heavenly Father’ and ‘Calgary’ - and the kind of guitar-and-vocals minimalism that made his name in the first place.
There’s the same push-and-pull between the intimate and the epic in the staging, which sees each member of the six-piece live band encased in their own neon nest of dazzling light-up piping, smartly reflecting the searing electronics that Vernon has so embraced in recent years. i, i featured a revolving cast of almost 40 musicians, as well as a choir, and in order to bring it to life, he’s assembled a multi-talented backing ensemble where everybody seems to be pulling double duty, whether it’s Sean Carey flitting between drums and synths in the same song or Jenn Wasner chipping in with crunching guitar one minute and soulful backing vocals the next.
Both Carey and Wasner are hugely accomplished artists in their own right, the former releasing acclaimed solo albums as S. Carey and the latter being one half of indie darlings Wye Oak; there’s a argument that Vernon is not even the most gifted songwriter in his own band.
And yet, he is one of his generation’s most singular voices, with the reflective aesthetic that characterised his first album continuing to inspire music’s biggest names - see Swift’s folklore and evermore , or Justin Timberlake’s Man of the Woods . And for every experimental maelstrom like ‘Hey, Ma’ or ’33 “GOD”’, tonight’s most stirring moments come when Vernon pares it back, whether on the hushed anguish of ‘Skinny Love’ and ‘Flume’ or the balm for frayed nerves that is ‘22 (OVER S∞∞N)’.
The Bon Iver name remains so synonymous with the image of the tortured artist locked in a log cabin with nothing but his guitar and broken heart for company that some of Vernon’s more casual followers might have found the ambitious, genre-bending nature of this show a far cry from what they were expecting - and make no mistake, this is no greatest hits affair, with Vernon instead choosing to push boundaries and perhaps the limits of his audience’s patience with forays into freewheeling jazz (‘Salem’) and freeform musical communion (the weirdly flat closer ‘RABi’). Still, as he sends off the crowd by expounding on that track’s themes of love and togetherness, he underlines just how deftly he continues to pull off the seemingly impossible - he makes soulless sheds like this one feel intimate.
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