4. 22, A Million / Bon Iver

Three albums.  Three classics.  From the woods of Wisconsin (For Emma, Forever Ago) to the continental expanse (Bon Iver), Justin Vernon turned his band's third album toward a stark present tense, wading into the difficulty and dissonance of lasting personal relationships in the glaring light of modernity.  Traditional arrangements have collapsed and reformed, the folk strums have been replaced by glitchy technology, and the results are no less thrillingly human.

22, A Million sounds like it was birthed in the eye of the zeitgeist.  Rather than an exercise in futurism, the record is pop music in the here and now, 2016 reduced to sound.  An amalgamation of autotune, R&B, and synth and sample tectonics, it is a gale force wind in the direction of the changing musical landscape, both embracing and subverting larger trends toward arena-pop, EDM, and hip-hop.  But there is also a quiet center that the record revolves around, a stillness that is circled and obscured by the maelstrom of emotional deconstruction.

Impressively, in the midst of such upheaval, Bon Iver still manages to retain its sonic essence because the record's lode star is Vernon's heart-on-your-flannel-sleeve crooning.  His voice is now among the most distinctive in music, the perfect foil for rappers like Kanye West or radio stompers like Francis and the Lights.  Though vocal effects give his timbre recognizable impact, it is also the way Vernon sings that amplifies the emotion, his sudden rises and falls, the falsetto that cuts through and changes the color and shape of a song.  It is fair to say that his voice is never overshadowed by the knob-twiddling or cutting-edge production--it is always the beating heart of the record's resonance.

The album art is riddled with pictographic runes and the song names, with titles like "10 dEAThbREasT ⚄ ⚄," are numeric/word codes waiting to be deciphered.  The brilliant lyrics, more e.e. cummings than singer-songwriter, seem to convey knowable mysteries.  Maybe taken together, they serve as a present-day map pointing to where the head and heart long to meet.  Because Vernon seems to find that place with his music over and over and over again.