Sufjan Stevens - The Age Of Adz
- Written by Jim Merrett
During the early- to mid-2000s, it's fair to say that Sufjan Stevens was someone lost in mythology – from the Chinese Zodiac of Enjoy Your Rabbit to the religious iconography of Seven Swans, an album enchanting enough to make me question my own pre-conceived ideas about Christian music, and his series of Christmas songs to the Twain-like tales of growing up (Michigan), then his carefully-studied breakthrough Illinois. The last were to be the first two stops on a proposed jaunt around the US. Following Illinois, if you were charting his success on a map, you could also assume he had got lost for real.
From 2005 onwards, speculation grew. Oregon, Rhode Island, even New Jersey were mooted as possible destinations. After airing an ode to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, his adopted home state New York was thought to be next on the list. But other than a second Illinois volume and scant other offerings, we've heard nothing.
Last year, Stevens admitted that the “Fifty States Project” was little more than a marketing gimmick. With any luck that also means we can take his recent claim to be quitting the music industry for good with a pinch of salt. But if The Age of Adz is to be Sufjan Stevens' swansong, he has at least attempted to sum up his entire back catalogue in one record. And yes, that includes his early foray into electronic bleepery.
This is one of those everything but the kitchen sink albums, if not in the same sense as Illinois. True, he's reassembled his orchestra, but that's not what stands out about this release. It appropriately begins where we left off five years ago, with the tender plucking and softly spoken sweet nothings of 'Futile Devices'. And then – all hell breaks loose.
'Too Much' lives up to it's title, sounding like how last year's ear-basher Embryonic must have felt if the only other Flaming Lips album you'd heard was The Soft Bulletin, and then only the sweetest parts of that. The first instinct is to duck the aural assault volleyed at your head and then to wonder who's been fucking around with your headphones before the song does its best to level out, a backing track of blips, hums, twinkles and ray-gun pows still confusing matters.
The title track can only be described as a Victorian steam punk soundtrack to Transformers. And if you're wondering if he's serious, penultimate track 'I Want To Be Well' is here to tell you he's “not fucking around” – over and over again. But nothing can prepare you for the biggest talking point of this album.
Epic is not the word, and in terms of song structure, 25-minute finale 'Impossible Soul' makes 'Paranoid Android' play like 'Barbie Girl'. This is some multi-layered shit even Inception's Dom Cobb couldn't dream up. It opens as a David Holmes jobbie retrofitted as a 1960s James Bond movie, takes a Glee detour, and then only gets weirder. Anyone not grinning ear-to-ear when the Auto-Tune – I shit you not – kicks in is either missing a mouth, one or both ears or should cut back on the Botox. Did the whole world just unravel in front of you?
Given his leaning towards the prolific during the early portion of his career, you could deduce from The Age of Adz that Stevens has tried to offload five years' worth of material in one go (most musicians would struggle to come up with everything squeezed into that last track alone in a lifetime). This long-awaited outing is as often messy as it is captivating and sometimes you suspect created only for it's maker's own amusement – he says as much, muttering, “I never meant to lead you on, I only meant to please me, however...”, before telling us “it's not so impossible”. But then again, you could probably say that about any one of his albums and the story behind it.
But finally without a theme, this time around, the mythology Stevens is lost in is of his own making. And if this is a mental collapse triggered by half a decade stuck in a prison of his own success, you wonder what the threat to retreat from music completely might inspire next.