Sufjan Stevens
“His lyrics often read like the work of a gifted but sheltered high schooler, and his music sounds like a drama student's idea of a pop opera — and it's all wrapped up on albums with stylized childish artwork, hand-drawn pictures that inadvertently wind up enforcing the impression that Stevens is an overgrown teenager.” – Stephen Thomas Erlewine
“Douche!” – Me
“Everyone’s always
asking, ‘What are you going to do about
“Then I go back to my Sufjan Stevens records and worry about whether my Ironic Tie goes with my Ironic Too-Small Dress Shirt and my Thick Emo Glasses or not. And wish I would be hit by a truck and reduced to a small, sticky streak on the ground.” – Capn Marvel
Albums Reviewed:
Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lake State
The Avalanche: Outtakes And Extras From The Illinois Album
Sufjan
Stevens is the current Indie God, and for once I actually agree with the
sidechopped masses. Mr. Stevens and his
hippy-freak parents (How do you think he got that name, anyway? And he has a brother named Marzuki) grew up in a rural area of
Michigan, during which time he learned to play roughly 487 instruments (though
he only received formal training in the high-powered rock and roll machine that
is the oboe) and, according to the bio on his label’s website, “bought a
4-track tape cassette recorder and painstakingly composed 90-minute concept
albums for The Nine Planets, The 12 Apostles, and The Four Humors.” After finishing college, but not before
slapping together 80 minutes of random crap he recorded there, founding a record
label (“Asthmatic Kitty”) with his stepdad, and releasing said 80 minutes of
random crap as an album without realizing he actually needed a distribution
system to sell it to anyone, he moved to New York to enroll in a creative
writing program. However, since there
apparently is not a Pitchfork-esque indie scene available to those who desire
to write “an epic collection of stories and sketches about backwoods Midwestern
kinsmen,” he then went back to music, this time recording an ear-grating
heavily-electronic instrumental album that sucks. Realizing that recording horrendous music is
not the best choice of career, he returned to writing songs by composing a
concept-album love-note to his home state of
Sufjan’s music is ambitious, reflective, and whimsical all at the same time. He started off as just a quiet, intimate banjo folk singer guy (not counting the two-thirds of A Sun Came and entirety of Enjoy Your Rabbit that sound absolutely nothing like this, ofcourse), but for his now-infamous “states” project he developed a kind of heavily-orchestrated, jumpy, alternately serious and silly folk-pop style that, if not unique in the history of popular music or anything, at least sounds pretty damn unique today, with trumpets and flutes and pianos and strings and oboes and all sorts of other interesting instruments tooting their way through numerous time signatures and interlocking melody lines, all underlined with these wonderfully insistent, jazzy drums. Combined with his beautiful, soft vocals and dense, overtly “literary” lyrics, Sufjan at his best is one of the best things going right now, and you should all go and grab a copy of Illinois as soon as you can, so tasty is its goodness.
Predictably, though, considering his meteoric rise, almost comical ambition (you know he’s releasing a quintuple EP box set of Christmas songs at the end of this year? Ay!), and the childlike whimsy with which he seems to do everything (Including, but not limited to, providing short, nearly non-existent linking tracks with such ridiculous titles as “To the Workers of the Rock River Valley Region, I Have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament” and “A Conjunction of Drones Simulating the Way in which Sufjan Stevens Has an Existential Crisis in the Great Godfrey Maze,” the latter of which lasts all of nineteen seconds), he is currently experiencing a backlash, at least in certain corners. For instance, Stephen Thomas “I write every single review on the All Music Guide” Erlewine despises him, and you can read his unnecessarily mean-spirited slam of all things Sufjan here. You can also read the 4.5 (out of 5) star review he gave to Paris Hilton’s Paris here and the similarly generous review he gave to Jennifer Love Hewitt’s BareNaked here. Clearly, Mr. Erlewine has infallible musical taste.
Putting
that aside, though (and really, the only reason for that paragraph was to post
the Paris Hilton and Jennifer Love Hewitt links. Please
read the Paris Hilton one. It’s
ludicrous), as well as putting aside Sufjan’s obvious and inherent
ridiculousness (I mean, a concept album based on every state? A quintuple EP box set of Christmas
songs? The name “Soof-yawn”?), this
silly man, if only based on the brilliance of
And, onto the reviews!
A Sun Came (2000)
Rating: 6
Best Song: “You Are
The Rake”
Equal parts sublime, scratchy folk music, odd, crappily-produced noise-rock, interesting, eastern-tinged mumbo-jumbo and giant piles of amateur-hour bullshit, which should be about what you expect when you consider this is really just a compilation of stuff Sufjan recorded on his 4-track in college that I don’t think was available for purchase anywhere until a few years later when Michigan came out and made him, if not Indie God yet, at least as big as, say, Devendra Fucking Banhart or someone is now. As a whole, weird and messy as it is, the album paints a pretty accurate picture of the admittedly talented complete stylistic mess Sufjan was around this time. He had apparently been in an eastern-influenced ethnic folk band or some such nonsense before “going solo,” plus he was still at that silly stage in one’s life where one thinks silly things like “Hey, let’s record two minutes of saxophones playing out of key!” and “You know what’d be great? My six year old cousin getting a fifteen second soundbite before this disorganized noise-rock mess about pudding!” and “Even though I’m awesome at writing really quiet folk music, why don’t I try to make a bunch of ugly guitar noise right here?”, so it’s not like every song here is gonna sound like “Chicago.” And did I mention he recorded these things at random intervals on a 4-track while he was in college? And half of it sounds like he had no business recording anything because it’s such amateur crap? I did? Well, then.
As “precious” as we all know Sufjan is, it’s still jarring to hear some of this material coming from him. “Demetrius,” for instance, is one practically un-produced guitar riff under which someone who can’t play drums worth crap (probably Sufjan) lays down what I suppose is meant to be a “rhythm,” before a totally out-of-tune distorted guitar solo leads us into the flute overdubs (OK, so you could probably see the flute overdubs coming, I’ll grant you that) and the “ethnic freakout” section that sounds like Indian snake-charmer music, only with an out-of-tune guitar line interjecting itself every 30 seconds. Sure. “Ya Leil” doesn’t even bother with the concessions to the western hemisphere and sounds like something Robert Plant might try to work into his next solo album. “Super Sexy Woman” sounds like it was recorded by a 10-year-old (hell, maybe it was; I bet it was co-written by the two little kids Sufjan keeps sampling talking about vomiting and boogers…which is just awesome, by the way), and “Satan’s Saxophones” is two or three guys purposely making saxophones sound like, well, instruments of the devil! I play the saxophone (um…sort of), so I’m well aware that if you try hard enough you can make the damn thing give off some of the most horribly ear-splitting, torturous squeak sounds on the planet, but that doesn’t mean I ever considered buying a 4-track and recording myself doing that.
You may be
wondering at this point why I deemed such an ungodly mess of an album worthy of
a 6. It’s a valid question, and the answer
lies in the fact that, for every noise-rock mistake, off-key Bollywood outtake,
or recording of Sufjan somehow making Kenny G seem talented, there’s a quiet,
intimate, gorgeous, almost jarringly lo-fi folk song. Sure, a few of the “experiments” turn out
alright, too (“We Are What You Say” does the eastern thing quite well, for
instance, “Jason” is great in its distorted vocal melodo-tastiness, and the
bubbling electro-rock stew of “Joy! Joy! Joy!” is a total winner, although a
horrendous influence on what Sufjan would do next), but it’s not like Sufjan’s
actually managed to break into the mainstream because he’s so good with sitar
solos and guitar feedback. It’s the
pretty melodies! And yes, for the most
part these songs consists of Sufjan’s recording himself alone with either his
acoustic guitar or his banjo in his garage or something (listen to “Happy
Birthday,” in which the tape hiss is probably the loudest part of the mix, for
the most egregious example of this), but despite the crap production you can
still tell he’s ace at writing these melancholy little melodies and his voice,
when in its proper setting, was as wonderful then as it is today. “Kill” and the title track are some more
examples of this, and when the songs actually sound like they were produced in
a studio instead of a meat locker (“Wordsworth’s Ridge,” the fantastic “You are
the Rake”), you actually start to see how this ridiculous, gawd-awful mess of a record could actually come from the guy who
recorded
Still, this is a record of the frequently embarrassing early 4-track noodlings of Sufjan Stevens, not a “Sufjan Stevens record.” It’s messy, it’s amateurish, it’s noisy, it’s ridiculous, and large chunks of it are better left unheard. All the quiet little pretty folk songs sprinkled about are what make it decent, and without them I’d be going on and on about how Sufjan had absolutely no idea what he was doing when he recorded most of this stuff. And hell, he probably didn’t know what he was doing, but at least he wrote a bunch of pretty little folk songs anyway.
Enjoy Your Rabbit (2001)
Rating: 3
Best Song: “Year Of
The Dragon”
No. No, no, no, no, no. No. OK, so I understand that Sufjan Stevens is a
rather interesting individual, and his innate oddness contributes to his
ability to create such wonderful music as what takes up most of
The funny thing is that this, to my knowledge, will be the first negative review of this album widely available for perusal on the internet once I post it, at least if you don’t count Amazon customer reviews or something (and those are mostly positive too). Did people actually listen to the damn thing before they reviewed it? I know Sufjan’s an indie hero and everything, but, for the love of god, who could possibly enjoy this? I’ll grant that the most atonal, non-musical, vomit-inducing track (“Year of the Monkey”) unfortunately comes first (not counting the 20-second intro that sounds just like it), and therefore the fact that the first song I heard sounded like a 50-foot, puke-colored iMac having a seizure certainly colored my opinion of this album upon first hearing it, but I’ve listened to this thing a lot since then in an ultimately fruitless attempt to get some sort of enjoyment out of the random sets of bleeps, bloops, and squeaks that take up the majority of it, and all that’s done for me is allow me to hear enough passable material to shove my original rating of 2 up to a 3. Christ, until some drums and high-ringing mallet-type instruments came in a minute or so into “Year of the Rat” (nearly six minutes after the album started), when I first heard this I wasn’t convinced it could be classified as “music” in even the most liberal-minded, “modern classical”-influenced sense. It was just a bunch of fucking noises! Thankfully, once the album gets cooking, a fair number of tracks can make the claim that they are, technically, “music,” but it’s certainly not all of them, and many of the ones I’m relatively able to tolerate have a two or three minute break where they sound JUST LIKE “YEAR OF THE MONKEY” and degenerate into a bunch of fuzzy, bleeping, ugly, computerized non-music. This is generally not something I support.
You know, I’m pretty much convinced no one who’s reviewed this album for a semi-reputable source (i.e. Pitchfork, the All Music Guide, etc.) has actually listened to it. Or if they have, they did it in a very cursory manner, just so they could glean one or two salient things to say about it and thus prove they had actually listened to this bloated, ridiculous monstrosity all the way to its conclusion. For instance, the All Music Guide review claims that Sufjan “maps out a wide musical territory by using each symbol as a mode, each one exploring different textures and tempos and, in the process, evoking a surprising array of moods.” I suppose that, if by “a surprising array of moods,” Jason Nickey means “a surprising number of ways to send Brad reaching for his Advil,” then he’s technically correct. Pitchfork, on the other hand, writes that Sufjan “proves himself adept of both long and short forms; downtempo and high BPM; glitches, scratches and ambient drones; blips, bleeps and bloops.” To this I reply that, just because someone uses something in their music, and even if they use it a lot, this does not necessarily mean they’re “adept” at it. I could buy a 4-track, record 80 minutes of myself playing the piano, split the recording up into 12 tracks and name said tracks after the most noteworthy and widely recognized gods and goddesses in the Greek pantheon (the random, off-key bashings in “Ares” would totally evoke the horrors of war, wouldn’t they? Just like the random, off-key bashings in “Hades” would illustrate the horrible gloom of the underworld, and the random, off-key bashings in “Zeus” would illustrate that I have no fucking idea how to play the piano). Would the existence of this theoretical album this mean I’m “adept” at playing this instrument? No, it would mean I’m a fucking douchebag for deciding my talentless, directionless noodlings might be something other people wanted to hear. I should also note something I’ve just now discovered in the process of gathering these quotes, namely that this Pitchfork review was written by one Jason Nickey, i.e. the same person who wrote the entirely different All Music Guide review! So the two most reputable sources available for a review of this ridiculous album boast reviews written by the same guy, which means I hereby retract my statement that no one’s actually listened to this record and instead posit the claim that one random idiot’s liking this piece of crap has undeservedly given it a positive critical reputation throughout the internet (assuming, ofcourse, he actually listened to it). Perhaps I should write both the All Music Guide review and eventual Pitchfork review (whenever it’s re-released with an entire disc of needless bonus tracks) of Van Halen’s Diver Down album but use completely different language in the two of them so no one realizes I wrote both unless they look at the tiny print down where the author’s listed. “Hey, Pitchfork and All Music both give Diver Down a perfect score! Dude, I should totally get that album!” I think this could work.
To my surprise, this album is not without worthwhile material. It goes without saying that long, long chunks are unlistenable, tuneless, bloopy, banging crap, but a handful of tracks are, at least, enjoyable in sections. The first half of “Year of the Rat” sounds like it could be the soundtrack to an enjoyable kids’ mystery/suspense movie, for instance, and “Year of the Ox” layers a pretty cool keyboard/bass line over those omnipresent phat electronic beats. Ofcourse, other sections of these songs are simply abominable and ear-torturing electro-fuzz-bleep-awfulness, but you gotta take what you can get, you know? The guitar line in the second half of “Year of the Boar” is a winner, too. Triumphant! The keyboard/drum bash that makes up the dominant theme of “Year of the Rooster” is nice as well, and hell, “Year of the Dragon” is good almost in its entirety! It sounds kind of like Sigur Ros, actually, in its subtly building dynamics and big guitar/keyboard/drums orgasm section. But then again, Sigur Ros wouldn’t insert those goddamn computer scratch noises into the song for no reason, so I guess we can’t have everything.
No matter
how much you love
Greetings From Michigan : The Great
Lake State
Rating: 7
Best Song: “
The first real Sufjan Stevens record, the first one not composed of random,
amateur recordings made in the closet of his dorm room or ear-grating, un-musical
noise that sucks, the beginning of the utterly ridiculous “states” project
you’ve all heard so much about, and in reality a pretty darn good little album,
though one that can’t help but look a little weak, hesitant, and underwritten
compared to what’s come since. Those of
you who aren’t “Mr. Indie” and therefore came to Sufjan through
That
doesn’t mean this one’s anywhere near
as good, though, and truth be told the ridiculous similarities between the two
mean I get the urge to listen to this one even less often than I probably would
otherwise, because if I feel like listening to this stuff…well, I can just put
on Illinois and hear it done much
better, right? Yes, this is the first
record that contains the “Sufjan sound,” the heavily and tastefully
orchestrated trumpet-y pop songs crossed with subdued, banjo-based folk music,
all featuring both Sufjan’s gorgeous, low-key vocals and numerous beautiful harmonies,
with a few random instrumental linking tracks that don’t go anywhere tossed in
for the hell of it (for instance, why do we need two minutes of overdubbed,
clinking glockenspiels with no rhythm or melody? And what does that have to do with
What I’m trying to say here is
that, while Sufjan is and always was ambitious, this was not a confident young
man making this record. He’s found
himself a great signature sound, but it’s hesitant and still not
fully-formed. It’s a little too slow and
languid at times, there are a few too many passages that go on too long and/or
don’t do anything interesting (I think two different tracks end in organ drones
that go for like two minutes), some of the trumpet lines are partially off-key
or not quite in unison…he’s latched onto something great, but it’s not quite there yet, you know? Yeah, all those arrangements sound great and
cool and jumpy and lovely all at the same time, and the vocals are beautiful,
but the album is actually a lot more
samey than Illinois (not an easy
thing to accomplish), and it almost sounds like Sufjan’s holding back a
bit. The “happy pop orchestra” tunes aren’t
quite as loose and free as they would be later, and a few tunes are just
layered, pretty mush (“Oh God, Where Are You Now? (In Pickeral
Picking up on this whole lyrical
discussion, there’s also something to be said for this being Sufjan’s most
personal record, since he grew up in Michigan and knows all the obscure places
he’s referencing like the back of his hand.
Listening to this after
Again, if
you’re at all familiar with
Seven Swans (2004)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “The
Transfiguration”
Sufjan takes a break from the states project to strip down his arrangements a bit, concentrate on a bunch of pretty folk songs that sound just like “Romulus,” and make sure everyone that didn’t figure out his strong Christian beliefs from the fact that he wrote a nine and a half minute song called “Oh God, Where Are You Now?” on his last album knows damn well that he thinks Jesus is really cool and stuff. And you know what? Cool. Good for him. As long as Christian music does two very important things, I have no problem with it whatsoever. First, don’t proselytize. Be subtle, you know? Don’t turn into U2 circa-October, Bob Dylan circa-his Billy Graham period or Creed circa-any time they wrote a song ever. And second, write good songs. I know this seems an obvious point, but if Creed had the chops, songwriting ability, and ability to not suck total ass of, say, Led Zeppelin, I probably wouldn’t mind Scott Stapp doing that fake crucifixion pose in all their videos.
Anyway, discussion of awful rock bands long-since broken up aside, Sufjan accomplishes both of these tasks quite nicely on Seven Swans (by the way, I just spent five minutes trying to think of some sort of clever pun on that album title and came up with nothing. Go me). Unlike with Michigan, though, those who came to Sufjan through Illinois (which, let’s face it, is everyone who likes him now and doesn’t have a sidechop haircut and/or write for Pitchfork) will have to adjust their expectations a bit, since this sounds nothing like the happy orchestral fun folk pop jumpy awesomeness of the record that made me do a page on this guy in the first place. As I said at the start, the sound here is stripped way down, and although that doesn’t mean it’s 12 straight soft, lo-fi banjo-folk songs like I thought it would be when I was readings descriptions of it, about half of the album is like that, and it’s not like anything else is gonna sound like “Chicago” (well…except one song). This is a folk album, not an orchestral pop album or an electronic diarrhea noise album, and at times it’s a very slow folk album, such as “Abraham,” in which Sufjan plucks a repeated, something like four-note acoustic pattern every ten seconds, sings very, very slowly in between this, and adds nothing else to the arrangement. Except for the last two songs, Sufjan only breaks out the drum kit once, for the almost deathly slow “Sister,” also the only time on the entire record he attempts anything resembling “noisy” (the distorted electric guitar line, and then the big “da da da da!” climax in the middle of the song), but even then, after the climax, the last ninety seconds morph into what might be the quietest, most intimate moment on the entire record.
However, this is not some random idiot singing intimate, lo-fi, banjo folk songs with occasional extra instrumentation. This is Sufjan “Pitchfork sacrifices a goat at my altar every morning” Stevens, and if there’s one thing that’s almost guaranteed to sound good in today’s musical landscape, it’s Sufjan Stevens singing a stripped-down, intimate, lo-fi banjo-folk song. The opening two tracks (“All the Trees of the Forest Will Clap Their Hands” and “That Dress Looks Nice on You”), beyond a few solitary piano notes and a backup singer or two in the former and barely-there keyboard in the second, have just about nothing besides Sufjan, banjo, and acoustic guitar in the mix, but they’re both gorgeous. “That Dress Looks Nice on You” especially is outstanding, and probably my 2nd-favorite song here. It starts out with just one quiet acoustic, then a very subtle second is added before that incredible little plucked banjo overdub thing before the chorus, which is downright awesome. “In the Devil’s Territory” comes next and shows that Sufjan can make things just as intimate when he’s orchestrating, too, as the big piano line and “to seeeeeeeeeeeeeeee you!” vocal hook are absolutely wonderful. Dig the space-keyboard, too! Who does he think he is, Keith EMERSON? No, Keith EMERSON sucks a nut.
A bunch of songs are a little slow and feel underwritten, sure (principally the entire middle-third of the album starting from “Abraham,” bar possibly the aforementioned “Sister”), but the inherent beauty and intimacy of the thing means it never slips below at least “tolerable.” And as I said before, I don’t even mind the overtly Christian lyrics. Not at all, actually. Sufjan’s voice is so quiet and soothing (it really does feel like he’s whispering in your ear all the time, and on songs as quiet and folky as these, that feeling is especially strong), and his softly murmuring “But I’m still asleep, and you woke me up again” or “I heard a voice in my mind: I am lord, I am lord, I am lord” is different from, oh, I dunno, Scott Stapp (to take a not at all random example) belting the same lines out from the top of a computer-generated cliff, you know? He’s a cute, quiet, nice little folky guy! He seems happy in his religion, so even when a bunch of backup singers belt out “He will chase you, ‘cause he is the loooooord!” with loud cymbal crashes and stuff on the title track I just think “hey, that’s an annoying and unnecessarily loud bit of instrumentation he decided to use there” instead of anything derogatory about Christianity.
Those
looking for something epic and “Illinois-like”
will have to wait ‘til the end for the “The Transfiguration,” easily the
catchiest and most beautiful religious hymn I’ve heard in a long time. It starts out with just a banjo, ofcourse, but
it’s actually played at a decent tempo, and then you get all these multiple
oboe lines and clingy triangle patterns and percussion and vocal harmonies and
it sounds just like the best songs from Illinois,
only a little quieter and with lyrics like “Lost in the cloud, a voice: Lamb of
god, we draw near!” Plus the main oboe
line that comes in around the two minute mark bears a remarkable similarity to the “I don’t mind! I don’t mind!” vocal hook from “
Despite
being a quite, intimate, banjo-folk album about Jesus and thus just a bit removed from an hour-plus orchestral
opus about one of the really populous states in that area I fly over a lot
apparently called “America,” from what he’s released so far this is certainly
Sufjan’s second-best record. It’s not a big improvement on
Illinois
Rating: 9
Best Song: “Come
On! Feel The Illinoise!”
The record that made a concept
album-obsessed Christian orchestral-folk-pop artist a semi-household name
(think about that for a second) and Pitchfork’s #1 album of 2005 (something I,
shockingly, completely agree with), Illinois
(or, literally, Sufjan Stevens Invites
You to Come on Feel the Illinoise) sounds exactly like Michigan, but about 100 times tighter, more focused, and simply better.
And yes, I know I already told you that in the
So yeah,
it’s really bouncy and fun and happy (except for all the sensitive soft folk
songs! But a lot of those are fun too!)
and it sounds just like
Musically, this album is a wonder, and is one of the most warmly and expertly produced records I’ve heard in a long time. Banjos, acoustic and electric guitars, trumpets, oboes, pianos, keyboards, strings, flutes, glockenspiels, beautifully massed backup vocals, and what appears to be a new (and MUCH better) drummer all add up to an absolutely fascinating musical stew here. And once you get past the slow piano intro track and follow-up timpani announcement track (you know, the kind of short instrumental thing that goes “Prepare to listen to a really fucking great album! And I will illustrate this point through extremely loud percussion!”), it’s nice how Sufjan pretty much throws the whole enchilada at you at once with “Come on! Feel the Illinoise!”, a nearly-perfect seven minutes of everything that’s good about this record. The production is so detailed I struggle to discern every instrument used even now, guitar or trumpet or flute or whatever solos weave in and out, and instruments and extremely detailed, thought-out melody lines come flashing in and out at such times that it’s clear Sufjan thought about this stuff long and hard, like the sudden shift from main melody A to main melody B around the two-minute mark that’s absolutely spot-on and the descending violin lines that contrast with the ascending guitar/keyboard thing (I can’t even tell which instrument it is!) a minute later that’s even more spot on, before main melody C (or is it main melody D by this point?) comes in and takes us home. The point is that the compositional acumen that went into this song is absurd, especially considering that Sufjan apparently played the majority of the instruments himself. And ofcourse he still makes time for Illinois-centric lines like “Chicago, the New Age, but what would Frank Lloyd Wright say?” and drops references to gigantic Ferris Wheel at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair twice (at this point I’d like to thank Wikipedia for doing all the research Sufjan did for me…and yeah, he could have used Wikipedia too, but that would take all the romance out of the album). I also must take time out to praise the album’s third six-plus minute centerpiece (along with “Come On! Feel the Illinoise!” and “Chicago”), “The Man of Metropolis Steals our Hearts,” which combines a totally rockin’ recurring guitar/drums part with gorgeous, quiet acoustic folk sections and about three or four more main melodies most acts could never come up with in their lives (like the main trumpet line and the “only a steel man came to recover…” chorus), as well as the brilliantly jumpy banjo tune “Jacksonville” and the brilliantly-titled “They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back from the Dead!! Ahhhh!”, whose chanted backup vocals are almost creepy in their effectiveness. There’s almost too much outstanding stuff on this record to describe in one review.
As amazing
as it is, though (and it is amazing),
there’s only so much heavily orchestrated Sufjanmusic you can take in one
sitting, and, in addition to the occasionally useless linking tracks and
keyboard drone things, once the end of the album rolls around Sufjan starts
either cannibalizing himself or just writing really fucking boring music. “The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders” was
undoubtedly meant to be “6+ minute album centerpiece #4,” but after an hour of
this stuff you begin to realize just how much this admittedly awesome sound
Sufjan’s created can start to sound exactly
like itself, and all the piano and trumpet lines start to blend together to
the point where I’m convinced this song is actually just four or five other Illinois tunes spliced together. In addition, “The Seer’s Tower” is four
minutes that sound like the worst, most melody-deficient crap moments on Michigan and the closer “Out of Egypt, into the Great Laugh of Mankind, and
I Shake the Dirt from My Sandals as I Run” consists of four and a half minutes
of elevator music, and ending such a ridiculously strong album on a downer like
this is just wrong.
A few more
Anyway, this is a fucking fantastic album that I’d totally give a 10 if Sufjan was at all able to edit himself. As it is, it’s really, really close to getting one, but it’s just a tiny bit too samey, it goes on just a tiny bit too long, and a tiny bit too much of it just isn’t very good. Out of what I’ve heard, if Kid A is the #1 album since 2000 and American Idiot is #2, then this is currently #3 on my list (I’m serious). And yeah, if Agaetis Byrjun hadn’t technically been released in Iceland in 1999 before coming out here later, I’d have to knock this one all the way down to #4, but it’s not like being the 4th best album released in a seven-year period is bad. Go pick it up today. Also, if he’s coming to play in your town, it’s probably a good idea to find out about this more than a week before the show.
The Avalanche: Outtakes
And Extras From The Illinois
Rating: 7
Best Song: “Adlai
Stevenson”
OK, I’m gonna try to make this review short. Every now and then I get into these strings
of writing really unnecessarily long reviews, and good christ am I in one now. It shouldn’t
take 1500 words just to say “Enjoy Your
Rabbit is completely unlistenable,” you know? And I think my
Anyway,
this album is exactly what it says it is, namely all the tracks that weren’t
good enough to get on Illinois, so it
sounds exactly like Illinois and has
oodles of references to Illinois people and places and landmarks and stuff but
it’s not as good. Apparently Sufjan
originally wanted to make
A bunch of
these songs are plenty tasty, though.
The title track was included as a bonus track on the vinyl version of Illinois (I so need a vinyl record player…), so you know it’ll be good, and the
songs that have been getting special rave reviews like “The Henney Buggy Band,”
the aforementioned “No Man’s Land,” and “The Mistress Witch from McClure (Or, the Mind that Knows Itself)” are fine
compositions, too. The first two are
totally in the mold of jumpy, multi-section workouts like “Come on! Feel the Illinoise!” from the album that’s
not totally made up of outtakes, but shorter and not as good, while the “The
Mistress” is another one of those lovely banjo folk tracks layered with horns
and whatnot like “Decatur,” only, you know, not as good. Good, though!
Sufjan clearly picked the right songs for
OK, to the bad. First off, there are three alternate versions of “Chicago” on here, a quiet,
all-acoustic one called, funnily enough “Acoustic Version,” a normal-sounding
yet less-interesting-than-the-one-they-kept one self-deprecatingly called
“Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version,” and a downright odd bubbling
electronic one called “Multiple Personality Disorder Version.” They’re all intriguing, but none come anywhere
near the quality of the one Sufjan
used on
And now, in
keeping with my edict to make this review at least semi-short, I shall end it, albeit with a suitably grand rhetorical
flourish (*makes wanking motion*). Taken
by itself, this is actually a quite nice record album, and I sometimes think I
enjoy it more than Michigan, which
was a “state” album not composed of
outtakes…but these are outtakes,
they’re outtakes for a reason, and
Sufjan is on record as saying he doesn’t even think that much of a lot of
them. A good half of it still rules
merciless Sufjan ass, though, and who doesn’t love a song about Adlai
Stevenson? Good times indeed. I can’t wait for
Songs For Christmas (2006)
Rating: 8
Best Song: “Put The
Lights On The Tree”
Sufjan Stevens is such an odd
guy. Case in point: this thing, that
quintuple EP box set of Christmas songs I alluded to in the intro. Apparently, every year since 2001 Sufjan has
taken a week or so in December to record a brand new 20-ish minute EP of
Christmas music (taking a break only in 2004 because he was working on Illinois at the time), burned what he’s
recorded onto a bunch of CD-R’s, and mailed his Christmas creations to his
friends and family. I can’t think of
anyone else on the planet about whom, upon hearing that they had been doing
such a thing, I would not be even remotely surprised, but Sufjan is obviously
not “anyone.” And yes, listening to this
for reviewing purposes means Mr. Hardcore Liberal Atheist Asshole over here has
had Christmas music playing in his car almost exclusively for the better part
of two weeks. It took about 20 minutes
of this for my roommate to threaten to open the passenger side door in the
middle of the 10 and jump out just as we passed the “
Amazingly, I didn’t start to get annoyed by the constant “our lord Jesus!” and “Glory glory!” and all that stuff ‘til rotation number of 5 or 6 through these discs, which should say a lot about Mr. Stevens’ musical acumen when considering the majority of these songs are, you know, rearranged religious hymns. He basically wrote, arranged, and recorded these things in a week apiece, and although the fact that each one only contains 2 or 3 Sufjan originals makes it a bit less mindblowing than it would be otherwise, it’s still pretty impressive. Christmas music or hymns or corny carols or not, in Sufjan’s hands this stuff is lovely, melodic, subdued stuff, and the “whispering in your ear” character of the guy’s voice is just about off the charts. It doesn’t sound any different from whatever record Sufjan had been recording at the time (so the majority either sounds like Michigan/Illinois orchestrated folk-jazz-pop or Seven Swans lo-fi banjo folk hibbity jibbity; thankfully no Enjoy Your Rabbit computerized vomit music here), but it all sounds good. There’s a quiet Sufjan folk version of “Amazing Grace” on one of these discs! Come on, you know that sounds good.
The packaging for this is a bit ridiculous, but perfectly normal and not-at-all-surprising coming from Sufjan. The five EP’s are subtitled “Noel,” “Hark!”, “Ding! Dong!”, “Joy,” and “Peace,” and each comes in its own little slip-case with a drawing of an exceedingly adorable animal on the cover (“Peace” has a lion in a Santa cap and its buddy “tiny white sheep it’d normally eat because it’s a lion, but this CD is called ‘Peace,’ get it?”). There’s a Sufjan poster insert, the other side of which contains a silly comic strip in which Sufjan tries to save Christmas with the power of music, fails, and in the end succeeds with the power of chocolate. There’s a big booklet insert which contains more silly drawings, several SufjanEssays (one of which isn’t actually by Sufjan, but if it didn’t say that you wouldn’t be able to tell), an entertaining SufjanShortStory, and lyrics and guitar tabs to every song on every one of the five CD’s. There’s an insert with stickers on it corresponding to the animals on the cover of the different EP’s slip-cases. Everything comes in a lovely shiny pastel box with a crayon christmas tree drawing on the cover. It’s very, very Sufjan.
Musically,
like I said, it’s exactly what you’d expect it to sound like if you’re familiar
with the SufjanCatalog in general. Two
things I’ll mention, though. First, a
song on the second EP (“Hark!”) called “Put the Lights on the Tree” is
absolutely outstanding and probably as good as any of the short, snappy pop
songs with cascading horn charts you’ll find on Illinois or The Avalanche. Second, the last EP (“Peace”), since it was
recorded in 2006 and thus represents the first new SufjanMaterial far enough
removed from Illinois to throw some
light on where he might be going artistically, is interesting as hell. First, it’s 11 tracks strong and has 5
original tunes, so it’s a lot closer to a real “record” than any of the other
discs. Second, it’s not folk-pop at
all! It’s totally power-pop, although
filtered through the standard Sufjan “I think we need an overbusy horn chart
here” sensibility. While it took me a
while to get used to Sufjan actually attempting to sing loudly instead of
whispering into the microphone (he’s not as hot at it), it’s pretty decent
stuff, especially “Christmas in July.” I
don’t know if
So yes, Sufjan continues to be weirdly endearing and endearingly ridiculous. But he’s still one helluva talented musician. Plus “Ding! Dong!” has a song on it called “Come On! Let’s Boogey to the Elf Dance!” That’s really all I need to say right there.