Big Red Machine - Big Red Machine

The Guardian 80

People/Jagjaguwar

Big Red Machine is the super-duo of Justin Vernon, aka Bon Iver, and Aaron Dessner of the National – plus a host of other names scattered across the credits including Phoebe Bridgers, This Is the Kit, and members of Arcade Fire and the Staves. It’s also the most high-profile fruit thus far from the People project, the duo’s online streaming portal for nimble sketches and collaborations – but any sense that this is minor work, just a bit of tooling about with your mates before a proper album, quickly evaporates.

The aesthetic is close to Bon Iver’s previous album 22, A Million – digital soul written with jangled nerves – and, as with that record, the busy arrangements draw their power from the simplicity of Vernon’s top lines. Like the soft-rockers he sometimes resembles, he draws from black styles such as porch-step blues and “quiet storm” R&B without it ever descending into bland appropriation, and on the stirring, scintillating trip-hop track OMDB, he even sounds like Atlanta rapper Future at his most hoarse and desperate.

Pitchfork 70

The debut collaboration of Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner is gorgeous and ponderous, a document of a creative process that feels a bit like watching someone get purposefully lost.