11 Stray Thoughts

1) The new album by Beach House, Bloom, is pretty good even though it feels more like a slightly different sequel to Teen Dream than the next step in the band's evolution. Don't get me wrong, it's almost as good as Teen Dream. Perhaps the best parallel is Radiohead's Kid A and Amnesiac; both are great, but the former came first and felt newer/fresher even if many prefer the latter.

2) After spending most of their career using as little instrumentation as possible, and falling more often than not on the dour side of things, The Walkmen have recruited producer Phil Elk and guest Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes to help them expand their sound. The result is arguably the band's best record yet, Heaven.

3) The titles of the new Beach House and The Walkmen albums should be switched. Heaven should be a place of relative stagnation but enjoyment (more like how Beach House's new one feels), whereas Bloom is more fitting for the by turns majestic and uplifting Walkmen record.

4) You should immediately go listen to all the Felt that you can. Such an underrated, under-known band.

5) I've slowly become addicted to Beach Fossils. Their new single, Shallow/Lessons, is fantastic, and I'm definitely anticipating their forthcoming sophomore record with increasing impatience.

6) The Horrors and The Drones are also underrated and under-known bands. The Horrors's Primary Colours sounds like a combination of Liars and My Bloody Valentine. The Drones recorded Gala Mill at the titular mill in an isolated area of Australia, and the atmosphere of that environment permeates these songs. The Drones sound most to me like the rock guitar side of Sun Kil Moon and the impassioned side of Nick Cave combined with bare bones, distorted Spiderland guitars as engineered by Steve Albini.

7) Bardo Pond's 'Back Porch' and 'Tommy Gun Angel' kick incredible amounts of ass.

8) The Days Of Wine & Roses by The Dream Syndicate is a perfect amalgamation of Velvet Underground and The Feelies-esque jangle-pop.

9) Sufjan Steven's Age Of Adz gets better with time.

10) How I Met Your Mother is my new favorite sitcom. Imagine a modern version of Seinfeld, with all the wit, neurotic characters, made up words and terms, and odd misadventures that implies, but actually much better than that comparison makes it sound.

11) Predator 2, as with Ghostbusters 2, is an unfairly maligned sequel to a classic film.

Sufjan Stevens- Age Of Adz

Age Of Adz is the biggest curveball Sufjan Stevens will ever throw. To label it thus still feels like a bit of an understatement. Since most of us were drawn to Sufjan Stevens by the Michigan and Illinois albums, it was easy to assume he was always going to be the orchestral folk/pop maestro. Indeed, since he originally planned to record an album for all of the 50 States, he seemed destined to stay in this style for the remainder of his career. Moreover, the astonishing quality and originality of these albums made it hard to accept that he might someday leave this sound behind and attempt new things. After all, Illinois is one of the best albums ever made; who wouldn't want 48 more? Right?

Right?

Well, no. Deep down we all knew he couldn't deliver on such a promise, though the speed with which he abandoned both the 50 States project and its style is still a surprise, at least to me. Sufjan has been going through a period of personal and creative wandering since roughly 2007, releasing a combination film/album tribute to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to modest fanfare and mostly working behind the scenes at his record label, Asthmatic Kitty. After a short tour last Fall, during which he performed some new, more experimental material, he surprised everyone by releasing a new EP without warning earlier this year. All Delighted People was a welcome return to pop music after the orchestral The BQE, but I found its mix of old style folky songs and new out-there epics to be a mixed bag. Luckily he soon announced a new album...

Which brings us up to speed, and thus to Age Of Adz. Going even further with the heavily electronic and electric guitar based tracks of All Delighted People, this album is easily the most experimental and chance taking of his career (not to mention the year in music). I saw him in concert a week ago, and his ten piece band and stage show often resembled the Flaming Lips as much anything else. The music oozed and breathed with heavy beats, pounding drums, shout-along vocals, deep hooks, and Sufjan switching between guitar spasms, pounding away at a keyboard/sampler, and busting out white boy dance moves. Hell, he even donned sunglasses and used a vocoder/auto-tuner, recalling Kanye West and Daft Punk far more than the tender fellow who crooned about driving to Chicago in a van with his friends.

Whatever you end up feeling about Adz (my friend Pat, a diehard Sufjanian, hated the concert and by extension this new album), it'd be hard to argue that this is one of the last moves anyone expected Sufjan to make. Detractors so often pinned him as a wimp who had a voice like a wounded bird that to hear him throwing around lyrics like “do you wanna dance?” and “I'm not fucking around” would have to be a joke. Yet here we are, and while I laughed a lot at the concert, it was with him instead of at him. Despite the continued apocalyptic dread and the break-up vibe carried over from the EP, which it turns out was inspired by outsider artist Royal Robertson, he sounds and acts like a man who has come out of, or is coming out of, a period of great personal and creative struggles. More crucially, he now sounds and acts like a man who wants to have fun with music while still pushing himself creatively.

The strange dichotomy between the dark subject matter and engaging, fresh music is mirrored in the sound of Age Of Adz. Retaining a good deal more of his orchestral flourishes and sullen acoustic stuff than one might assume, the album nevertheless is undoubtedly all about the heavy electronic stuff. Come to think of it, this album reminds me quite a bit of Owen Pallett's recent Heartland album, combining classical and electronic music as it did. Anyway, at the show, Sufjan thanked the audience for indulging his new material, explaining that he had moved from heavily composed and thought-out music to a more spontaneous and instinctual style based as much on sounds and textures as traditional pop songwriting. To that end, even the shorter, seemingly more “traditional” tracks of Adz are weird by Illinois standards. 'Now That I'm Older' is like being stuck in an echo-y chamber full of vocals, a piano, and some lovingly plucked string instruments; for as many keyboard bloops and swooshes as it has, 'Bad Communication' may as well be a sped up Stereolab song. 'All For Myself' is something else entirely, a damaged electro/choral pop tune that blurts in and out of loudness like a record skipping or a stuttering loop, and reminds me of nothing else in the world except 'Cuckoo Cuckoo' by Animal Collective. Maybe that's grasping at straws, but if you had told me this time last year that I would be comparing Sufjan to Animal Collective, I'd have assumed the album is question is the worst thing ever or the best.

The reason Age Of Adz will go down in history in people's minds as one of those two options is the longer tracks. Listening to the whole album with a good pair of headphones is a good idea, since there's so much detail and density that can otherwise be lost, but for songs like the title track and 'Vesuvius', they're downright mandatory. Sufjan's previous albums utilized dozens of instruments, true, but they rarely sounded as full and powerful as the slow burning hooks and peaks of Adz. And thanks to 'Impossible Soul', this album matches if not bests Illinois in terms of ambition and scope. It initially sounds all over the place and as much of a mess as All Delighted People, but these complaints soon metamorphose into positives. You've really got to sit with Adz and give it a chance. Take a few trips down its strange, all-encompassing highway to get a better sense of its boundaries and it starts to sound more cohesive and sensible than anything this long and out-there has a right to be.

While I don't think Age Of Adz is an unqualified success, it is, if nothing else, the kind of album he needed to make at this point in his life if he still wants to have a career. What I mean is, churning out Illinois sequels would be fine, but it would limit his growth as an artist. Since Adz ends with the 25 minute epic-to-end-all-Sufjan-epics 'Impossible Soul', he has certainly made up his mind regarding growth and trying new things. As a result, this is an exhausting and not always consistent record, but it rewards those open minded listeners who stick with it. Where All Delighted People merely appeased and bored, Adz is sure to elicit extreme reactions: I think it's his best album that isn't called Illinois, and my friend Pat hates it. So there you go.

Age Of Adz is an unwieldly mess of an album; it is flawed, challenging, and indulgent. But Adz is also a fascinating, brilliant, and rewarding monolith from a gifted artist with vision and guts to spare. Whatever your opinion of it, there's no arguing that it is easily the most chance-takingly different record of 2010. Hell, it makes Congratulations by MGMT seem safe by comparison! But I digress. No matter how it will be contextualized by future Sufjan Stevens releases, Adz should rightfully go down in history as one of those moments where an artist threw most of their playbook out the window and made music in a different way, sonically and structurally. This is Sufjan Stevens's Kid A. Grandiose claim that it may be, I can't think of another time in recent memory that someone stepped so far outside of their usual modus operandi but still retained their identity. Anyway, I love Kid A just as much as I do OK Computer, so why can't I love Age Of Adz as much as Illinois? I've got the room in my heart and the time to enjoy both. To paraphrase Sufjan, it's a long life; do you want to dance?

5 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

Sufjan Stevens- All Delighted People EP

Last Fall, Sufjan Stevens embarked on a relatively small tour during which he played a good deal of new, unreleased material. I saw one of these shows, and it was somewhat shocking to see him play as much electric guitar as he did the acoustic instruments I associate with him. Songs would carouse into extended fusion jazz blurts from his backing band or elongated guitar solos more akin to say, Built To Spill, than anything he had done before. Last Fall also saw the release of The BQE, Sufjan's symphonic work; in his own words, an attempt to get beyond pop songwriting, which he saw as his “greatest weapon.” So, with those concurrent developments in hand, the biggest surprise to me about this EP is simply its sudden release. After half a decade had elapsed since any new music from the man (The BQE aside, which is a different beast entirely), it was odd to wake up one day and see that he had a lengthy EP available for download and streaming.

Weighing in at eight songs and nearly an hour of music, it's odd that All Delighted People is considered an EP and priced as such. Only $5 for so much new Sufjan music?! What a deal! After a few listens, though, it becomes apparent why so much is available for so little. This EP is a hodgepodge of disparate music, all of it a notch or two below Sufjan's other work. Five shorter, more traditional songs jut up against three, uhm, different-beasts-entirely. To say it doesn't hang together or feel of a piece is an understatement. All Delighted People feels like a sweeping-of-the-table before the forthcoming The Age Of Adz, which, judging by the recently released song 'Too Much', sounds very little like this EP. One gets the feeling that Sufjan has been aimlessly puttering away in the studio over the past couple years and figured he might as well release the results before his “real” next batch of music hits. I could be wrong, of course, but Sufjan's releases have always had a crucial unified feel and flow that All Delighted People utterly lacks. Illinois was pretty varied, yet it works as a whole. Its track ordering and flow are impeccable. All Delighted People is, to quote 'From The Mouth Of Gabriel', “a very big mess.”

What's more, this is a real downer of an EP. I recall thinking that Sufjan seemed a bit bummed and out of it at the concert last Fall, and he's made comments in the press for the past couple years about how he didn't see a point to making albums anymore. Consequently, most of these songs seem given over to post-break up depression and apocalyptic dread. I never agreed before when people said that Sufjan's music was sad and defeated, or his voice whiny, but it's hard to listen to 'The Owl And The Tanager' and think otherwise. With minimalist piano backing and some vocal echo, he recounts a tale of some kind of love gone wrong, tied up in odd symbolic bird imagery, ending with the line “one waits until the hour is death.” Character sketch or harrowing personal tale, there's no symbolism to 'Arnika', bearing a refrain that sounds like a suicide note: “I'm tired of life, I'm tired of waiting for someone.” These shorter songs aren't awful, but they remind me of the kind of artless, going-through-the-motions poetry I used to churn out when I was depressed in high school and college. Compare even the best of these songs to his past work and the difference is stark. 'Enchanting Ghost' has some of his worst vocal work to date, with a rushed, strained delivery that sounds as if he wanted to finish as quickly as possible because he had to piss.

Elsewhere, those different-beasts-entirely sound like the experiments they (probably) were. 'Djohariah' is unforgivably long even if it does feature the bracing electric guitar soloing that impressed and surprised me at last Fall's show. Yet as guitar solo showpieces go, it's a long, long way from any of the old classics, and possesses the constant feel of building to some payoff or peak that never comes. Save the seventeen minute version for concerts, I say. Meanwhile, the two versions of 'All Delighted People' bring in the apocalyptic aspect I mentioned earlier. They make decent use of some borrowed lyrics from Simon & Garfunkel's 'The Sounds Of Silence' and the “original version” is probably this EP's most successful attempt at doing something new. It expands and contracts over its eleven minute run time, bringing in choral voices, malfunctioning noisy electric guitars, an orchestra, and a brass section, all topped off with an orchestral ending reminiscent of both the famous Psycho shower scene music and the speeding up cacophonous part of 'A Day In The Life' by the Beatles.

In my review of The BQE, I concluded that it was “neither terrible nor a complete triumph; neither essential nor forgettable.” It's odd that I wish I could say the same about All Delighted People. Many modern artists are using the EP format for music that, while not necessarily better than their albums, is at least almost as good as their albums. I paid what is essentially a standard album price for the Water Curses and Fall Be Kind EPs by Animal Collective on vinyl, and I don't regret it one bit. I don't normally bring up prices in reviews since they're largely irrelevant, but I feel like $5 is the absolute maximum you should pay for All Delighted People, even for a vinyl copy. Its experiments aren't terribly successful and the older style songs are sub-par. Here's hoping that new album I've been longing for back before even my BQE review proves he hasn't totally lost it.

2 Poorly Drawn Stars Out Of 5

My Favorite Albums Of The 00s (Part 2) & (Part 3)

Sorry for the lateness. As you'll see in the third video, I've been having all sorts of issues with my computer and Internet lately. Anyway, they're finally done. Should have a written review up tomorrow. And yes, from now on the videos won't be lists.

Sufjan Stevens- The BQE

Fans of Sufjan Stevens have been right to wonder what the hell he's been up to for the last four years. After 2005's amazing Illinois album, subsequent outtakes-and-leftovers The Avalanche, and a compilation of Christmas songs (Songs For Christmas), Sufjan seemed to disappear behind the scenes of his Asthmatic Kitty record label. Then there were murmurings of him working on a new project, and in 2007 it was played for the public: a longform orchestral piece about the Brooklyn Queens Expressway in New York with an accompanying film. This, however, still doesn't explain the two year gap between the performance and its release as The BQE, but whatever.

Composing a long orchestral work may seem a bit out of Sufjan's league, but take a listen to the Michigan and Illinois albums again. They possess a symphonic structure in some regards, as well as containing overtly orchestral music and instrumentals. The simplest way to describe the sound of The BQE is to say that it's like Sufjan wrote an entire 40 minute album of that kind of material, but there are some key differences. As this one is entirely instrumental, there's a greater variety of melodies and ideas, as well as a true symphonic scope to the proceedings. It's as superficial as the way the piece is divided up into "Movements" and "Interludes" (as well as a Prelude and Postlude, naturally), but also as deep as the way some of those melodies and ideas are referred to or varied over the course of the work. I won't go into much detail as far as the music goes, but I did want to highlight the sequence of 'Movement III: Linear Tableau with Intersecting Surprise' and 'Movement IV: Traffic Shock', which lie at the heart of The BQE and are its best moments. The former contains one of the best orchestral hooks he delivers here, recalling 'Out Of Egypt, Into The Great Laugh Of Mankind, And I Shake The Dirt From My Sandals As I Run' from Illinois; the latter is an electronic, videogame-y sounding surprise, providing a refreshing break from the symphonic nature of the album while still riffing on the melodies of the previous track.

Sufjan has been making a lot of comments in the press lately about his probably-dead 50 States Project and how he's wondering what the point of the album as a format is, and something like The BQE is his first stab at getting beyond the current format. Whether he continues down this path is impossible to say, but allow me to step outside the bounds of a review of the music and address the "mixed media" portion of this project. The film portion of The BQE is about what you'd expect, lots of shots of traffic, driving, artsy night shots of stoplights and headlights, etc. You'll maybe watch it twice and only listen to the music from there on out. I can't really speak to the 3D Viewmaster reel(!) that comes with the CD version since I don't have a Viewmaster, and I don't have access to the 40 page comic book that comes with the vinyl version. Meanwhile, the longwinded philosophical essay by Sufjan printed in the booklet is, quite frankly, a bit too indulgent and pretentious for my liking. Ultimately I have to wonder who this stuff is for, other than hardcore fans. If this is his solution to an existential crisis about music, songwriting, and the album format, it seems like a misguided-but-charmingly-niche one.

Like most projects that seem unusual for an artist you love, The BQE is neither terrible nor a complete triumph; neither essential nor forgettable. It's an interesting, borderline-challenging diversion from Sufjan's usual output that will only appeal to hardcore fans or those with an open mind about orchestral/symphonic music. Personally, however, I hope he doesn't continue down this path, mixed media or even orchestral. Instead I wish he'd just make a damn album already.

Video: Sufjan Stevens- For The Widows In Paradise, For The Fatherless In Ypsilanti