Justin Vernon and co treated Wembley Arena to astonishing songs with revolutionary sound-quality and visuals – with one surprising echo
I doubt that Wembley has experienced such a concentration of beards and beanie hats since a local wood carving workshop saw the whittling of a series of totem poles for a civic art project back in 2018. But ever since Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon disappeared to a remote hunting cabin in Wisconsin to write his folk-infused debut album For Emma, Forever Ago in 2007, the band have become a byword for clever and intricate craftsmanship, albeit of the sonic variety. Before the show, I feared that the lumberjack-shirted masses would be let down by the unforgiving concrete cavern that is Wembley Arena; that dodgy sound would turn Bon Iver’s complicated arrangements into indistinguishable soup. How wrong I was.
For a start, the musicianship from the six multi-instrumentalists on stage at this much-delayed show was nothing short of remarkable. Anchored by Vernon, they each stood in their own pod – an enclosure of tangled neon – surrounded by an array of kit. With each song, they switched from keyboards to drums or from guitar to saxophone as they painstakingly constructed the songs.
Then, there was the sound. It was without question the highest-resolution reproduction I’ve ever heard at a concert. The sound enveloped you as each element ebbed and flowed, enabling you to pick out individual motifs and nuances. It was quite revolutionary. Apparently Bon Iver are using a new hyperreal sound technology called L-ISA. Well, Lisa should come to every gig. As we all get poorer over the coming year, fans will rightly expect more from the experience of going to a concert. This sounded like the future.
And then there were the lights. Sounds boring, doesn’t it? But the band played beneath a canopy of twenty-five square lights that descended, tilted and rippled like a morphing cathedral ceiling over their heads. At one point, light was bounced off the top of these squares and angled off in other directions. Further layers of lights above and below the canopy created a visually stunning spectacle. The lights were the very definition of above and beyond.