{"id":1916,"date":"2011-03-10T07:01:20","date_gmt":"2011-03-10T15:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/poptheology\/?p=1916"},"modified":"2011-03-10T07:01:20","modified_gmt":"2011-03-10T15:01:20","slug":"age-of-adz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/poptheology\/2011\/03\/age-of-adz\/","title":{"rendered":"Sufjan Stevens Stretches Out"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Richard Lindsay reviews Sufjan Stevens\u2019 latest album, The Age of Adz<\/em>, after the jump.<\/p>\n

\u201cGod must get awfully tired of hearing the same thing over and over again, and in His all-embracing wisdom could certainly embrace a dissonance\u2014might even enjoy one now and again.\u201d \u2013 Charles Ives<\/p>\n

\u201cStop being such a God-damned sissy! Why can\u2019t you stand up before fine strong music like this and use your ears like a man!\u201d \u2013 Also Charles Ives (presumably in a fouler mood).<\/p>\n

At my undergraduate music school in the early nineties, we spent a significant portion of our theory and history classes wrapping our heads around the avant-garde sounds of the Twentieth Century. These were the composers our instructors told us were now \u201cimportant,\u201d as opposed to the classical Beethoven and Bach, pop-classic John Williams and John Rutter, and concert bandmasters like Alfred Reed that had motivated us to go into music in the first place. We feigned a knowing appreciation of Charles Ives\u2019 dissonant polytonality, John Cage\u2019s chance music (one piece involved people walking around tuning radios to different stations) and the tape loops of Steve Reich and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Our professors self-assuredly told us this was the \u201cclassical\u201d music of the future.<\/p>\n

What I think they imagined is that one day we would go to concert halls and listen to abstract acoustic and electronic soundscapes that would challenge our notions of musical theory and form. What they, and we, didn\u2019t realize was the \u201cmusic of the future\u201d would happen according to its own anarchic patterns. As electronic mixing technology spread, innovative musicians like Aphex Twin, Nullsleep, Deadmau5, Daft Punk, Moby, and Bjork, would not wait for the stuffy approval of the \u201cformal\u201d music world. The \u201cserious\u201d composers we studied in music school, when drained through pop music\u2019s democratizing sieve, would become what we now know as electronica.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In The Age of Adz<\/em> (pronounced \u201codds\u201d) Sufjan Stevens (pronounced SOOF-yan STEEV\u2026you get the idea) has produced a remarkable album of acoustic and electronic soundscapes that represent a clear break from his previous work. Already the songwriter\/performer of what may be the best indie album of the last ten years (Illinois<\/em>, 2005) Stevens put his growing audience on the line to produce a wild song cycle of clashing beats and electro-noise. The response from the fans that know him as the aching, banjo-playing, latter-day Elliott Smith who wrote such exquisitely produced chamber pop as \u201cCome on! Feel the Illinoise!,\u201d \u201cJohn Wayne Gacy, Jr.\u201d and \u201cThe Predatory Wasp of the Palisades is Out to Get Us!\u201d has been nothing short of consternation.<\/p>\n

To understand this reaction, you have to know who Stevens\u2019 audience is (or used to be). An alumnus of both an evangelical Christian high school and college, Stevens has been an Emerging-church poster boy. His previous albums have included spiritual music that has caught on with both the secular indie scene and the post-Christian-pop crowd. For evangelicals of a certain hipness who were tired of defending the artistic merit of (or lack thereof) of CCM, Stevens was proof that \u201cChristian\u201d music could produce a real innovator. The fact that several of his songs have homoerotic undertones that would have sent their culture-warrior parents into fits of banshee-like rage only added to Stevens\u2019 appeal for evangelical X-ers and Millennials. But after waiting for five years for his post-Illinois LP, only to be confronted by the experimental musique concrete of The Age of Adz<\/em>, it is his young Christian fans who have been thrown into a rage, and a palpable sense of betrayal.<\/p>\n

The opening song on Adz, \u201cFutile Devices,\u201d lulls the listener with a more typical Stevens sound: acoustic guitar and piano, and vaguely homoerotic lyrics. \u201cYou are the life I needed all along\/ I think of you as my brother although that sounds dumb\/ and words are futile devices.\u201d Is this written to a friend? A lover? Jesus? Who knows?<\/p>\n

\u201cGet Real Get Right\u201d is pretty inoffensive as well, dedicated to the album\u2019s muse, African-American outsider artist Royal Robertson, whose work adorns the album cover and booklet. The song is a funky groove with drum machines, willowy woodwinds and a horn line. It refers to Robertson\u2019s apocalyptic obsessions: \u201cProphet, brother, priest and king\/ Snake-skinned master at your feet\/Barricade the bathroom doors\/ Find some things you can\u2019t ignore.\u201d But the chorus is a classic gospel music message, \u201cGet real, get right with the Lord.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cToo Much,\u201d when not overwhelmed by scratchy white noise, seemed to be channeling Stevens\u2019 inner Devo, at least when I saw the clip of him on Jimmy Fallon. \u201cVesuvius\u201d is a repeated chant that builds in intensity like a lava flow, slowly erupting with strange, bubbling electronic sounds popping around the vocal line, culminating in a descant of elementary-school plastic recorders. Just as the chaos is about to explode, an anti-climax of chopped-up vocal and electronic shards brings us down the other side of the mountain.<\/p>\n

Stevens has said in interviews that Adz<\/em> reflects an evolving interest away from long-form narrative songwriting towards the musical gesture. There are plenty of musical gestures\u2014repeated vocal lines, riffs, and patterns\u2014on this album. This is not entirely a departure, as Stevens\u2019 previous album, while sounding much more conventional, also showed a tendency toward the kind of looping American minimalism of composers like Steve Reich and Terry Reilly.<\/p>\n

\u201cI Walked\u201d demonstrates Stevens has not lost his narrative skill in the midst of the new electronic tone-world he is creating. Addressed again to a nebulous \u201clover,\u201d the song has remarkable lines like \u201cFor when you went away I went crazy\/I was wild with the breast of a dog\/I ran through the night\/With the knife in my chest\/With the lust of your loveless life.\u201d If that\u2019s musical gesture over narrative, I\u2019ll take it.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow That I\u2019m Older\u201d starts with a remarkable wordless arrangement for voices that has the doleful, bluesy sound of a field chant or spiritual. (Perhaps a musical theater version of a field chant or spiritual). Either way, it\u2019s haunting. If a middle-class guy from the Michigan suburbs can sing the blues, this is it. \u201cAll for Myself\u201d benefits from a similar repeated scratched-record blues riff.<\/p>\n

This Sufjan-in-a-blue-funk vocal style is used to less positive effect in \u201cBad Communication,\u201d which plods like a funeral march being led by a Casio keyboard. Other songs that don\u2019t \u201ccommunicate\u201d so well are \u201cThe Age of Adz,\u201d which starts with a grinding robotic apocalypse and morphs into several other overwrought innovations during its seemingly interminable eight minutes. It\u2019s a bad sign when you\u2019re checking your iPod for the number of minutes left in a song because you can\u2019t believe the thing is still going.<\/p>\n

A song that definitely challenges a pop-music listener\u2019s sense of time, but is more likely to reward patience, is the 25-minute epic, \u201cImpossible Soul,\u201d that rounds out the album. This is the kind of musical adventure that would have covered the B-side of an album back in the days of vinyl. (Look it up on Wikipedia, kids.) The song seems to be about woes in a relationship using some nebulous, possibly closeted gender-switching language. (The song is addressed to someone Stevens calls \u201cWoman,\u201d but is spoken like a man who has never addressed a lover as \u201cWoman.\u201d) The song might just be Stevens\u2019 version of Bob Dylan plugging in at Monterey (look it up on Wikipedia, kids) with the folk singer shredding a spiky, screechy electric guitar solo, and even using (gasp) auto-tune. Even more remarkable, it sort of works. I doubt we\u2019ve heard anyone with Stevens\u2019 musical skill and vocal sensitivity use auto-tune before; it\u2019s usually a tool of rappers and tonally-challenged soul divas.<\/p>\n

There are times when Stevens\u2019 range-straining Bobby-Brady-hits-puberty vocal stylings are too weak for the sheer muscle of the horns, beats, and bleats he has amassed. It would take a considerably more powerful singer\u2014perhaps Tom Jones\u2014to out-sing some of this cacophony. Stevens the producer and arranger also continues the penchant for his clatch of \u201cjust the girls\u201d backup singers (one imagines three white Brooklyn women-hipsters with requisite nose piercings and tattoos) with perfect diction but no sass or jazz in their voices. Their bland vocalizing eventually grates when used in nearly every song, both on Adz<\/em>, and on the more listenable Illinoise<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cListenable\u201d is less the description of Adz<\/em> than \u201cchallenging.\u201d But opening your ears to an artist stretching his talent can be an enlightening experience. Stevens\u2019 next album, however and whenever that comes about, will hopefully combine the best of this new sound and some of the old sound that his fans love (unless he\u2019s really a sucker for art at the expense of financial success). The noise of The Age of Adz<\/em> may very come from the construction of something quite exciting and new.<\/p>\n

One more word about the gendered address of Stevens\u2019 songs. An indie folk singer was never hurt by a little sexual ambiguity. Presumably, at the age of 35, Stevens knows which way his sexuality trends\u2014and it doesn\u2019t appear to be exclusively heterosexual. This would be nobody\u2019s business but his own, except folk singers tend to sing about relationships a lot, leading to natural curiosity. And LGBT people are not yet free. There are queer evangelical kids marooned at Christian academies and colleges who could use a role model. Some of them would rather kill themselves than face their families, churches, and friends with the truth of their sexuality. If they could see a man with immense God-given talent, who tours around the world performing creative and sensitive music, and who just happens to be queer, it would them a lot of good. The Age of Adz<\/em> represents a bold new beginning, what may be seen as the first of the mature work of an important musician. It will be interesting to see if Stevens matches this adult album with an adult admission of who he is.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Lindsay reviews Sufjan Stevens\u2019 latest album, The Age of Adz, after the jump.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":288,"featured_media":1917,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"yoast_head":"\nSufjan Stevens Stretches Out<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Richard Lindsay reviews Sufjan Stevens' latest album, The Age of Adz, after the jump. 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