The final tour? The beauty of Bon Iver

Bon Iver, 5th November, Berlin Arena

We stand in a cavernous hangar, lit only in the gaping rafters. The blank acoustic space slowly amasses sound-absorbent bodies, its atmosphere increasingly electric with the anticipation of seeing one of the best bands of our generation.

I kept looking longingly at the beams above our heads, presenting the impossible temptation to perch monkey-like above the hordes and receive the full impact of the sound. But even without this height, subsumed instead within the pulsing crowd, the liquid beauty of Bon Iver’s music seeps into your (very sweaty) skin.

Opening with the soft electric guitar riffs of Perth, the virtuosity of the whole band was showcased from start to finish. Every member of this behemoth group is humblingly multi-talented. Special mention for drummer/singer/one-man-band Sean Carey, whose soaring falsetto is one of the most exultant vocals I have ever heard (and that while he is drumming in perfect unison with Bon Iver’s other percussionist Matthew McCaughan). The set grew through other tracks from the band’s second album, Bon Iver, swelling into the ecstatic nostalgia of Towers and the emotive 80s homage Beth/Rest.

As always with the ‘famous’ single, there is a risk of disappointment, but For Emma, Forever Ago’s Skinny Love evolved seamlessly from initial understated delicacy to climactic, heart-thumping power. The pared-back acoustic recording is replaced in the live set with a throbbing leviathan of a song, from the first unadorned chords to the punctuating bass drums in the chorus which compel you to stamp your feet in time. And this is how I would characterise the whole gig – a perfect balance of fragile beauty and stomping euphoria.

From their heartfelt folky roots to their experimental impressionism, Bon Iver get it all right. Justin Vernon’s elemental, resonant bass and sinewy upper register perfectly complement a band whose tonal subtleties arise out of skilful layering, a respectful fusion of synths and acoustic sounds, and a genuine emotion that pervades every note – the instruments and their players metamorphose into one ecstatic sphere of sound.

All of which brings me to lament the fact that Bon Iver are having some down-time after this tour. Justin Vernon has said ‘I need to walk away from it while I still care about it. And then if I come back to it – if at all – I'll feel better about it and be renewed or something to do that’. So, if you haven’t yet, listen to Bon Iver and revel in their exquisite musical beauty. And hope that their renewal comes quickly to grace the stage again. In the meantime, this is a good place to start.

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Skyfall – when did James Bond become the ‘damaged superhero’ du jour?

Bond, the wounded superhero, the zeitgeist protagonist of our times. This is what critics have been going wild for, claiming that the new film combines emotional depth, resonant topicality and scintillating wit.

Bond is indeed ‘damaged’. We see him as a shaking, stubbled, alcoholic wreck. Later we are supposed to be shaken, perhaps even stirred, by his silent, brooding contemplation of his parents’ deaths, reflected in the bleak mists of the Scottish moors that host the climax of the action. But this seems instead to damage the film and the very essence of who Bond should be. Yes, the franchise is an amorphous series that metamorphoses through the decades, but that is no excuse for the over-emotive scenes with M in which we are supposed to perceive the ‘real Bond’, but instead find ourselves faced with a cliché of the flawed hero type much harder to swallow than the clichés of Bond’s classic one-liners.

The film does have undeniable strengths. The cinematography is stunning; the plot (until the last half hour when all degenerates into an unimaginative shoot-out) is compelling and does indeed attend to our very real concerns about cyber terrorism; and the bad guy, Silva, is chillingly played by Javier Bardem as a floppy-haired, pout-lipped dandy with a malicious policy of vengeance, unnervingly veiled by the fineries of his deliciously camp demeanour.

But with the exception of Bardem, the acting is dubious, particularly from Bond-girl-come-secret-agent Eve (Naomie Harris). She is also proof of the film’s enduring sexism; by the end of the opening chase scene through the bazaars of Istanbul, we have already witnessed the banal mocking of her driving skills and ability to aim a gun. Critics such as Jane Martinson in The Guardian acknowledge this but believe it to be counterbalanced by the figure of M. The head of MI6 is heralded as ‘a proper female hero’, but it seems to me that, although her spirit and resilience are strong, she is actually undermined by the fact that she is losing her grip on the agency, by her reliance on men (Bond, Ralph Fiennes’ brilliant Mallory) to protect her bodily when she fails to do so, and by her callous disregard for the lives of her agents. For this Martinson praises her, but despite the surprising humour it brings to the film, it often seems unnecessarily spiteful rather than a necessary sacrifice for the greater good (Bond arrives back from the dead: ‘We sold your apartment. You’re not staying here.’ and so on).

It seems to me that critics have been blinded by the contemporaneity of the plot and so have overlooked the fact that, beneath the virtual whizzbangs of the hacking world in which Bond now dodges computer trackers as much as bullets, the film is a hackneyed yoking of modern and classic. It thus fails both to have the pure entertainment factor of the old Bond films or the compelling emotional resonance of a modern drama. Bond has indeed (sky)fallen from grace, and fallen hard.