Even among admirers of the most recent Bon Iver album, of whom there are a great and vocal many, there is some degree of discomfort regarding the final track. A soaring, stately, unapologetically anthemic power ballad hung on a warm keyboard melody, “Beth/Rest” offers up its charms more readily than anything else on the record. The song’s fans praise its easygoing guilelessness; its detractors assail it along the lines sketched by Allmusic’s Tim Sendra, who writes that it “sounds like the theme song to a horrible ’80s movie about unicorns (only not that good).”

The adjective most often invoked in relation to “Beth/Rest”—even by apologists, even on occasion by Bon Iver auteur Justin Vernon himself—is cheesy. Cheese, in the present context, can be taken as American English for kitsch, or the use of sentimental expressions in outmoded idioms, and with respect to “Beth/Rest” the term is not misapplied. The most prominent timbres we hear in the song—chiming synthesizers, dueling saxophones, towering overdriven guitar solos, extremely gated drums—have been relegated among sophisticates to punch-line status roughly since Nevermind hit the charts. Lyrically, “Beth/Rest” seems to be an openhearted declaration to a beloved, its reassurance and apparent sincerity flying in tight formation with sentimentality as it is commonly understood.

Vernon would not dispute this characterization. In 2009, a little more than two years before the release of Bon Iver, Bon Iver, he told Pitchfork that “the concept of Bon Iver has been about our place in the world and our sentimentality”—suggesting that listeners are indeed hearing what Vernon wants them to hear. But sentimental and about sentimentality don’t mean the same thing. Sentimentality has a bad name for a good reason: in the arts, it operates by borrowing our emotions and selling them back to us, reassuring us that our feelings and beliefs are legitimate simply by reminding us that we have them. It tends to plaster over distinctions and differences, to encourage groupthink, and as such is always among the least dusty implements in the demagogue’s toolbox. And yet the capacity to experience genuine sentiment—and to communicate it sincerely to others—is not only a basic human impulse but also a necessary precondition of democracy. So this stuff gets kind of complicated.

What Vernon seems to have set out to do—throughout Bon Iver’s catalog to date, and in “Beth/Rest” in particular—is...