Bon Iver turns in powerful performance

The crowd couldn't sing like Justin Vernon -- his high-pitched voice sounds untethered from his body, like a balloon that's slipped from his grasp, with the upward trajectory of a moth headed for the sun.

Still, he lobbied for some audience participation anyway.

"Would you guys sing with us?" the Bon Iver frontman asked near the end of his band's tempestuous set at The Joint on Thursday. "You start quiet and you gotta get louder and louder, and by the end, you're just screaming."

By this point in the 90-minute show, however, no one needed to be told as much, as this was the tread-softly-then-explode dynamic that powered much of the evening.

The stage served as a protein shake for this bunch, a conduit for an influx of muscle-building amino acids, adding heft and density to the band's intricately constructed indie folk, which can be papier-mache delicate in recorded form.

Think of Bon Iver's two records, 2008's "For Emma, Forever Ago" and last year's Grammy-winning "Bon Iver, Bon Iver," as skeletons upon which the band piled layers of sinew and bulging veins in the live setting.

Backed by an eight-piece band that included two drummers and a beefy baritone saxophonist who looked as if he could have a successful second career wrestling bears, Vernon fleshed out his songs, which, lyrically speaking, veer toward the inscrutable.

One could spend an afternoon Googling the arcane words, sometimes made up, and left-field references that constitute Vernon's lyrics, complete with Biblical allusions, nautical terms and vague metaphors.

"The subconscious is a dirty thing," Vernon announced before playing the spare, acoustic "Beach Baby," and one gets the sense that, for him, songwriting is a means of tidying up said mess.

As a performer, however, Vernon is much more direct, laying his motives bare, invigorating his songs with a kinetic physical presence, hopping up and down on one leg, duck walking across the stage, headbanging and playing his guitar from his knees at times.

He rocked out unself-consciously, the way he might in his bedroom when no one was watching.

Vernon's heightened adrenaline levels manifested themselves in Bon Iver's tunes as well.

The band dug into their songs hard, right down to the marrow.

Show opener "Perth" was a harbinger of what was to come, beginning at a low simmer and ending in a rancorous din with blaring horns and concussive drums that cracked like lightning felling a redwood.

"Holocene" was initially colored by blithe four-part harmonies before reaching an overheated crescendo that culminated in a screeching sax solo, which bled into "Blood Bank," another full-bodied jam where Vernon ripped out the kind of metal-worthy guitar leads that are normally punctuated by a wagging tongue and lots of devil horn hand gestures extended in the crowd.

These more deliberately overblown moments were contrasted with more tranquil ones, such as hushed waltz "Michicant" or the stark, solemn sounding "re: Stacks," a song so muted that it was nearly drowned out by crowd chatter.

The audience members' voices grew louder still for "Skinny Love," which turned into a loud, throaty sing-a-long that felt like a final release of the pent-up energy that Bon Iver's catalog is so rife with.

"I told you to be patient," Vernon howled, leading by example, seemingly addressing a former flame and the adoring throngs before him in the same breath.

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.