Thursday, 10/11/11 Bon Iver @ Leeds O2 Academy

The expansive nine-piece approach on display tonight blows the lonesome log cabin 'For Emma, Forever Ago' was famously conceived at into matchstick-size chunks...

If anyone's turned up for tonight's sold-out show expecting to be crooned at by an unlucky in love troubadour armed only with an acoustic guitar and a wounded heart, they're in for a shock scale surprise.

Bon Iver's most readily associated with the stark, wintry alt. folk laments of 2008's hugely celebrated 'break-up album' 'For Emma, Forever Ago'. Taking its cues from the richly detailed arrangements of this year's self-titled second album, which saw Bon Iver grow from Justin Vernon's solo trip into a bona fide band, the expansive nine-piece approach on display tonight blows the lonesome log cabin 'For Emma...' was famously conceived at into matchstick-size chunks.

Packing the most horns you can expect to see on stage this side of a brass band performance, the nine-piece Bon Iver orchestra have clearly been instructed to bring the noise. The overall tone of Bon Iver (the album) is that of Vernon reflecting on past and present bad turns whilst taking in a drizzly landscape through a tour bus window. The horn-bingeing, instrument-swapping ethos of reinvention that drives tonight's set switches the album's winningly melancholy, greyscale soundscapes into retina-scorching multicolour.

On record, the instrumental break of set opener 'Perth' resembles a mournful funeral march. Tonight, it blooms into a brass-empowered whirlwind of white-knuckled intensity. Most of 'For Emma...' material, meanwhile, is catapulted several miles from its sparse origins: a soul-flavoured take on 'Creature Fear' builds into a storming crescendo that verges on pure cacophony. It'd very easily collapse into an alienating heap of self-indulgent honking. Instead, Vernon and co. deliver an ecstatically received bravura performance that turns Bon Iver's trademark downbeat introspection into cathartic, unexpectedly robust anthems.

It takes some doing to turn solitary howl of sorrow ‘Skinny Love’ - probably Vernon's best-known song, due not least to Birdy's recent hit cover - into an upbeat communal choir moment, but that’s precisely what happens tonight. 'Minnesota, WI's weary refrain (”never going to change”) isn't exactly the rousing stuff of singalongs, but the audience chooses to belt it out spontaneously regardless, turning the original's resigned shrug into a defiant boast. 

It’s not totally faultless. ‘Blood Bank’, the stage by now bathed in blood-red lights, verges worryingly close to standard-issue “epic” rock. Drawing from a relatively small pool of base materials, Vernon's songs deal in textures and moods rather than the kind of magnetic hooks that characterise truly memorable songwriting. If Vernon had tunes even half as immense as his astounding vocal prowess, Bon Iver would be unstoppable.  

But as Vernon commands the capacity crowd's rapt attention with little more than his falsetto-frequenting, wounded wail of a voice on the evening's sole solo moment, a spellbinding take on 'Re: Stacks', any doubts fade into insignificance. The standing ovation the night finishes with is well-earned: on this form, Bon Iver are fit for converting the doubters and turning existing fans into foaming at the mouth evangelists