Soundbite: "Bon Iver"

Before the “Twilight” movie sound track collaboration, before being sampled by Kanye West and before appearing on stage with the same rapper at Coachella earlier this year, Bon Iver was just a one-man band that made a single beautiful album alone in an isolated cabin in snowy Wisconsin.

That album, 2008’s “For Emma, Forever Ago” became a surprise critical and commercial success, racking up gleaming reviews. Its success found Bon Iver, the stage moniker of Wisconsin native Justin Vernon, fielding calls for all manner of musical projects.

West collaborated with Vernon for a pair of songs on “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” most notably sampling Bon Iver’s Auto-Tune masterpiece, “Woods,” on “Lost In The World.” Bon Iver also spent time recording as a member of the band Gayngs. While working on so many musical side projects, Vernon admitted that he forgot how to write songs on his own and called his touring band mates and other studio musicians to help him craft songs for his new album.

Bon Iver’s eponymous second album finds Vernon stretching himself, experimenting with new instruments and the limitless production elements made available to him by being a newly successful musician. In that respect, he seems to adopt the same “more is more” approach as Iron and Wine’s Samuel Beam after the success of that band’s stripped-down initial releases.

With its funky, Afro-beat electric guitars, the second song of the new album, “Minnesota, WI,” even starts out sounding a lot like the songs of Iron and Wine’s more lush third album, “The Shepherd’s Dog,” before spacey keyboards and saxophones join in. Saxophones pop up a few too many times throughout the album, bringing an element of adult alternative cheesiness to many otherwise pretty songs. The thump of thick, fuzzed-out bass and the arpeggios of a banjo add much appreciated drama to the song and suggest the wide-ranging influence of such divergent artists as Kanye West and Mumford and Sons on this year’s music scene.

The songs themselves are built around sounds rather than lyrics, which are often obscure and ambiguous. Instead of using lyrics to convey a clear meaning, emotion or story, Bon Iver chose to construct songs by stringing words together to create a specific sound or rhythm. On the opening track, “Perth,” Vernon sings, “I’m tearing up, acrost your face / Move dust through the light / To fide your name / It’s something fane/ This is not a place / Not yet awake, I’m raised of make.”

The effect of filling the songs with such muddled lyrics is that, despite being named after specific places, the songs don’t have a clear meaning and instead express a general feeling of searching or of shifting surroundings, which was perhaps Bon Iver’s intent.

The lack of lyrical clarity, however, makes the few instances when intelligible phrases emerge from the murky wash of layered vocal and instrumental parts all the more powerful. Lyrics such as, “And at once I knew I was not magnificent,” on the slowly marching track “Holocene,” pack an emotional punch despite a song structure that builds without really going anywhere.

The album has many beautiful moments with Vernon’s gorgeous falsetto at the center of it all. “Towers” transforms halfway through from being another acoustic ballad into being a fun country shuffle, complete with slide guitars, while “Hinnom, TX” recalls the sound of TV on the Radio with Vernon’s deep, textured voice dueling overdubs of his usual falsetto and sporadic horns.

Unfortunately, Vernon chooses to close the album with the schmaltz-fest ballad, “Beth/Rest,” a low note that clouds some of the beauty of the rest of the album. Featuring the soft-rock wail of saxophones and an electric guitar, plinking keyboards and the slow thud of a drum machine, the song sounds awfully similar to the radio versions of Disney songs that played during the credits of those movies in the ’90s. One half expects Michael Bolton and Vanessa Williams to make an appearance for a delightfully cheesy duet. The difference is, Bon Iver is serious.

“Bon Iver” shows Justin Vernon developing, evolving and exploring his identity as a musician. With this growth and experimentation, there are bound to be a few missteps, and the album as a whole is less memorable than his first release. There are sparks of promising beauty, but nothing quite lives up to “For Emma, Forever Ago.” The refusal to regurgitate the successful formula of that album is encouraging, and hopefully Bon Iver rediscovers the art of crafting a memorable chorus and leaves those dusty, old saxophones in the closet.

Email Flynn at [email protected].