"I can see for miles, miles, miles."
Slight delay in announcing November's rotm as I've been on holiday. But that holiday gave me time to really listen to the new Bon Iver record and appreciate just how good it is. In particular, the tracks 'Perth', 'Calgary' and the quite brilliant 'Holocene'. And so, while it might have been released slightly pre-November, it's 'Holocene' that gets November's rotm.
First time I heard it I knew I liked it, but then it continued to grow on me, which is when I know that I really like a song. The constant, echoed guitar riff underpins the whole thing but - a bit like Okkervil River's 'Mermaid', an earlier rotm - there's so much more going on and to listen closely for. I remember once reading that classical music students have to complete exercises where they are given a piece of music that they have to listen to and they need to be able to dissect it into all the constituent instrument parts. This would probably make brilliant subject material.
Listening to the track reminds me so much of our holiday, driving across hundreds of miles of the long, flat roads of Wisconsin and Minnesota under early winter's sharp blue skies. The line "I can see for miles, miles, miles" pretty much speaks right to that. As we were driving, Clare absently said that this album was the perfect music to accompany our journey. She was right.
