#4 – Sufjan Stevens – The Age of Adz
You know who’s going to be the most surprised person that The Age of Adz is ranked this highly? Me. You see, it had been five years since Sufjan last released a full album, the *amazing* Illinois (aka Come on Feel the Illinoise!), and needless to say, the anticipation had been mounting. After all, it not only made a bunch of top ten lists of the year, it had also jumped to many top albums of the *decade* lists yet most people hadn’t head a peep from him. For awhile, I thought he was going to pull a Jeff Mangum (from Neutral Milk Hotel) and release this wonderful album and just say, “Yeah, I think I’m done writing music.” which didn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. So let’s go back a few months, as I’m youtube-ing (see, it’s a verb) Sufjan and I started running into clips from the new album and had a similar reaction to many of his fans. WHAT. IS. THIS?? Gone were almost all of the instrumentation and style he had come to be known for. No banjo, no acoustic guitar, and no piano. The song seems to follow no real regular structure in spades. I heard lots of *bleeps* and *bloops* with electronic percussion and was left scratching my head thinking, “What *happened* to this guy?”
So what changed, you may ask? Here’s how *this* progression happened. October 12th, the album is released. Sometime in late November I decide, “*Sigh* I might as well just get it.” And I kid you not, within a day of listening to it, really giving an honest chance for the first time, I distinctly remember thinking, “Okay. I totally get it. It’s different but it makes sense to me.” What made sense to me is that even though the instrumentation and style was different, *compositionally* it’s still totally Sufjan. Without a doubt the songs still have his unique stamp on them and I understood that. I mean on one hand my mind couldn’t wrap itself around that this was still, somehow, the same guy who wrote songs like “Chicago”, “For the Widows in Paradise, For The Fatherless in Ypsilanti”, and “To Be Alone With You” and on the other couldn’t shake these new sounds.
So I then thought that I now had to find a spot for the album. By this time, I had already put together my list so first of all, someone had to go (sorry, Fran Healy) and then I had to figure out where to put Adz. The toughest part is that it’s TOTALLY different from every other album on the list so the logical question was how can you compare this work when it’s unlike everything else? Well at first I was just going to bail out and put it around 13, then I though that since I can’t quite compare it to anything else I might as well put it in the middle at #8. That lasted until I started to grab the links and videos for it and realized how much of a connection I had drawn to this album and that *no way* was I going to put it that low. So during the last few days it slowly rose four more slots so here we are.
So where are we, and what’s with this oddly (pun intended) named album? Now Sufjan did a better job at explain the album here than I’m about to do, but I’ll give you the Cliffs Notes version. The Age of Adz (pronounced “odds” so now you get my pun) takes its thematic center around a southern folk artist and self proclaimed prophet name Royal Robertson. In fact, all the artwork used throughout the packaging (including the cover) are all of Royal’s work. Royal had visions, and created artwork, that often featured the apocalypse, spaceships, aliens, and loads of other like allusions. I don’t need to tell you that was almost assuredly a paranoid schizophrenic. Most of his artwork almost always had some association to his ex-wife, whom he felt intimately betrayed by (as well as women in general), yet the reality is that she left for her own safety because of his mental state and in fact maintained to love him from afar. Sufjan, in part, writes this album with Royal’s mental word as the template so if the music is disjointed and all over the place at times, multilayered in other spots, and the lyrics run through cycles, it’s because this is Sufjan’s response to the art and life of Royal. The other main influence came from Sufjan’s life as well. He admitted that about a year ago he had contracted a mysterious debilitating viral infection which absolutely changed his perspective on what he wanted to do creatively next. Instead of following his regular artistic path of writing long form narratives, he instead switched to focusing on sounds, mood, creating a more physical and visceral response to music, which flipped everything on its head and in the story and in the art of Royal, he found a template to do that in a cohesive manner.
As for the individual songs, I love the first half of this album and then, for me, it gets a bit hit or miss either in totality or in parts for some of the tunes. Things start off with “Futile Devices” which is the only song on the set that is somewhat like his older stuff. For awhile I couldn’t figure out why he’d start off with a song that’s almost a tease for those wanting to hear an album more along the lines of the older style. It then occurred to me that Futile Devices is kind of the last gasp of “normality” before descending into the broader themes, as previously explained, of messiness, loss, jumbled emotions, paranoia, and the like. I think this holds we see towards the end of the closer “Impossible Soul” him lyrically pulling out of the bog and then musically it ends somewhat back to this territory. So from bookend to bookend we see a story arc unfold.
That’s the album in a macro sense whereas we also see in the title track, “The Age of Adz” he does almost the entire album in a micro sense as these themes get tossed around with multilayered instrumentation in some spots juxtaposed with minimal bits sometimes immediately succeeding. This was actually the first track on the “new style” that grabbed me as it just slams you right in the face with this almost menacing, march like, musical idea and never lets go. In “Too Much” I think we get the closest to a something resembling a single in this style, at least it’s the one he’s playing on the late night circuit, although it gets muddied throughout. The song that gets to me personally, more than any other song released this year, is “I Walked” which, and I’ll spare you the details, is one that completely encapsulates Josh circa 2007 and things I was thrust into navigating through. Good thing this album didn’t come out back them else I would have been a total puddle of mess. *ahem* Anyway, “Now That I’m Older” is one of those pieces Sufjan does very well in which he blends pure voices and sound with a lyric that coveys how it can feel to be acutely aware of one’s mortality. During the second have we see some more of these themes of loss and confusion with tracks like “Get Real Get Right” which is a statement to see just that happen, “Bad Communication”, and “I Want To Be Well” among a few others. For reasons I still don’t understand, I’ve woken up on more than one occasion recently with “Vesuvius” stuck in my head. The album ends on the aforementioned 25 minute long “Impossible Soul” which, ultimately, rights the ship lyrically in terms of pulling out of things. It also has a spot with a liberal amount of auto-tune thrown in and I don’t know how I feel about that but oh well.
Okay so even though this is by far the most I’ve had to say about any of the albums on the list, it didn’t make #1. It’s a little bloated in spots and I lose interest in a few of the tracks in portions but worse things could be said. It’s by far the most ambitious album on the list and just his courage to throw aside much of what made him well known is commendable. It’s a disc of real heart, even with lots of electronic flourishes and beeps, with a genuine soul dealing with emotions and tops most of us had to work through, so there are universals at play even if the terrain can socially feel foreign. I implore any of Sufjan’s fans to toss aside all preconceptions and give this one an honest listen. I think you’ll thank me later. Here are the requisite videos:
Futile Devices
Age of Adz
I Walked
Too Much
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