Review: John Vanderslice - Romanian Names

Originally published in NME 13/05/09

Under the Influence: Lykke Li

"I don’t normally get influenced by a song or a beat. If I hear a tragic story, someone talking about something that went wrong, that’s what influences me, broken destinies and broken souls. I can’t listen to anybody for long, everything from hip hop to jazz and soul, the Velvet Underground and that kind music, but I don’t have any pop artists that I think are amazing. I love Lauren Hill, but I don’t think of her when I write a song. I’d like Usher to remix one of my songs. It’d be really funny to hear.

I’m listening to Bon Iver a lot at the moment, I’m a big fan. For the next record, I think I’m going to lock myself out from the outside world, drink whisky, and take it slowly, like Justin did.

I like On the Road, The Catcher in the Rye, biographies – I read Edith Piaf and Nina Simone’s – some Paulo Coehlo when I was younger and trying to find myself. I read a lot of the classics too, the Master and the Margarita.

My first records were the typical Madonna, Michael Jackson, probably some shitty mix music compilation.

Everyone asks me about Madonna – I liked her when I was seven – everyone did – so I don’t want to cite her as one of my influences, as she’s not. I think she’s a completely other person now than she was then.

I’ve always had such a strong desire about myself – I think it was mostly that which inspired be to become a musician. I’d like Usher to cover one of my songs."

Bon Iver - Blood Bank EP

It’s hard to write about Bon Iver without disintegrating into plaid shirt cliches and log cabin metaphors (not to mention melancholy), but there’s something so whiskey-hazed warm and familiar about the opening hymnal notes of ‘Blood Bank’ that it’s hard not to. Throw in some trademark gruff falsetto crooning about kisses in the snow and the creak of Christmas morning, and you’ve pretty much got a Pitchfork reader’s wet dream right there. But all crassness aside, this is the kind of EP that makes you want to embrace under the covers all weekend, avoiding the harsh chilling bite of reality whilst swooning to the ‘Wolves Pt. I & III’-esque “I know you well” refrain. The identikit reviews which trailed ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’ labelled it as being haunting, but rather than pressing you to confront ghosts and skeletons that you’d rather forget, ‘Blood Bank EP’ is more akin to the comforting spirit of a lost friend, there to hold you through lock and key protected feelings and make you realise that it’s not so bad after all. The folorn romantic of Justin Vernon’s debut remains only in tone (there’s seemingly a Mrs Iver on the scene), as he heavily accepts the reproductive purpose of humans on ‘Babys’ (sic), which opens with a peculiarly detached cinematic feel. It’s only ‘Woods’ that jars, a vocoder-ed baying at the moon that’s so uncharacteristically Bon Iver that you wonder whether it’s a flippant musical two fingers up to the critics who pigeonholed his debut. But that aside, anyone who’s spent 2008 holed up in their bedroom trying to stop tears falling into their keyboard whilst listening to ‘For Emma…’ isn’t about to be granted a reprieve with ‘Blood Bank’.