Losing His Touch

THE ECCENTRIC in retreat isn’t a new character in pop, but it has specific meaning in 2016. The relentlessness of modern internet conversation has led to an implicit threat: Be everywhere, or don’t be at all.

In that framework, retreat begins to look like reason. And it’s worth noting that it’s never been clear just how much Justin Vernon — whose Bon Iver project exists at the intersection of nature, technological disruption and personal frailty — wanted to be heard in the first place.

In the five years that passed between his last album and 22, a Million, his new one to be released Friday — his slipperiest and least tactile effort — Vernon largely returned to the mist. He got waylaid with other projects — collaborations with Kanye West, Bruce Hornsby and others, and a new music festival in his hometown, Eau Claire, Wis., which spotlights the sort of sprawling jazz- and roots-influenced music he’s been playing since college.

But after an encounter with semicelebrity — Grammy wins for best new artist and best alternative music album, and the high-profile work with West — Vernon has remade his own mythology. 22, a Million is what happens when a performer who craved interiority re-entrenches after finding a spotlight he couldn’t shake.

His old approach has been interrupted, disinterred, exploded. The guitar, which was central to Bon Iver’s early releases, is largely minimised here in favour of percussion, electronic effects and also saxophone. The vocals, which grew increasingly unreliable from his first album, For Emma, Forever Ago, to the second, Bon Iver, are rendered here even more unstable thanks to variegated stylistic approaches and new technology — something he’s called the Messina — that allows for real-time digital manipulation of voice and instruments.

The results are, in many places, as ethereally and lustrously beautiful as the best Bon Iver material but more removed. There seems to be a wink at that at the outset: The first song opens with something like a quivering foghorn, suggesting a distance that can’t quite be overcome. By the second song, 10 Death Breast, the hardware and software are working overtime to melt the voice into a warm, buttery lather.

Vernon’s singing is more wide-ranging here than ever before — the opening of 715 — Creeks has echoes of Frank Ocean’s deadpan soul; on 21 Moon Water, Vernon’s falsetto slides into New Age territory; 8 (circle) owes a debt to Hornsby, and on ____45_____, Vernon is a bluesman, deploying perhaps his most direct singing here.

The music similarly dissolves. 22, a Million makes For Emma, Forever Ago, which was recorded in a remote cabin and has a jarringly intimate ambience, sound like a Mumford & Sons record. Vernon remains in thrall to decidedly unhip roots-music edge-pushers like the Indigo Girls and Hornsby, and also to gospel and folk music, but prefers painting atop them, rather than interweaving. That’s a collateral benefit of privacy.

Because this album travels in so many directions, there are places where Vernon sounds unanchored, and where his reluctance gives way to lack of commitment. His naïveté has always been carefully studied, but sometimes here, especially in the middle of the album, it feels just vague.

For Vernon — or Ocean, or Lorde, or Feist, or Adele, or any number of stars who take their damn time — keeping quiet is first and foremost an act of self-protection. It sets terms, blocks out prying eyes and grabby hands. But unlike Ocean, who returned with abundance, or Adele, who returned grand as ever, Vernon has somehow come back even smaller than before. Embrace is still awkward for him. NYT TO CREATE a true, full-blooded biopic, filmmakers need a free hand: MS Dhoni, The Untold Story, which claims to give us Mahendra Singh Dhoni Uncut, is much more generous with details from his childhood and his days of struggle than from his blazing tenure of star wicketkeeper-batsman-captain of the Indian cricket team.

The result, with the exception of a few interesting bits and pieces, is bland and predictable. The overlong film cherry picks the details it wants to serve us, skirting all grey areas and controversies: there are no smart nose-digs, only ingratiating bouquets; only hurrahs (the critique is so muted that we can barely hear it), and loud background music which is used to drum up emotion and drama.

It begins with promise. Young Mahi is more interested in football, badminton and tennis, and tries to blow off his first coach (Sharma) who spots his potential. The entire bachpan-adolescence section, featuring the father (Kher) who thinks a job will take his son much further than sports, the mother who believes in her son, the sister (Chawla) who is a solid support to him, his bunch of loyal friends who just know he can do it, has