In a music world that frequently seems to be predicated on more of the same – the algorithms that direct you to stuff that sounds like stuff you already like, the narrow perameters of genre-specific playlists, the risk-aversion of record labels and established artists alike – there’s something tremendously appealing about the fact that you never quite know what a Sufjan Stevens album is going to sound like. Javelin arrives a few months after his last album, Reflections, a collection of technically challenging instrumental piano duo pieces written as the score to a ballet, reflecting Stevens’ classical training. Although should that sound dauntingly highbrow, it’s worth noting that the concluding piece was titled And I Shall Come to You Like a Stormtrooper in Drag Serving Imperial Realness.
That was, in turn, preceded by: A Beginner’s Mind (broadly acoustic and based on films ranging from All About Eve to Hellraiser III); the meditation-focused Convocations (a five-volume set of beatless “meditation music”); The Ascension (electronic pop, inspired by Ariana Grande); Music for Insomnia (abstract synth-heavy instrumentals recorded with his stepfather); The Decalogue (another ballet soundtrack, this time for solo piano); Planetarium (a grandiose space-themed concept album made with the National’s Bryce Dessner and composer Nico Muhly); and Carrie and Lowell, a sparse, wracked, grief-stricken meditation on the death of Stevens’ mother. If that sounds like dilettantism, it never feels like it in reality. He’s clearly multi-talented and possessed of an unfailing melodic ability, but his greatest musical skill may lie in always seeming completely immersed in whatever project he’s pursuing, even Christmas songs: he has released nearly five hours of the latter, displaying a level of devotion to seasonal good cheer that would give Santa pause.
He sounds even more immersed than usual in the heartache of Javelin, led by the despairingly titled single Will Anybody Ever Love Me? Everything That Rises has him begging Jesus for deliverance from romantic despair, and the eight-minute centrepiece Shit Talk is a crushing depiction of a relationship that hasn’t quite ended but has clearly run its course. Musically, the album presents the listener with a succession of feints. Initially, every track seems like a return to his roots, the years when his primary musical focus was home-recorded alt-folk: they open with fingerpicked acoustic guitar or banjo, or with Stevens playing a piano that sounds like it might benefit from the attentions of a professional tuner. But they seldom stay like that, instead unfurling in various different directions. A minute in, opener Goodbye Evergreen suddenly explodes into something epic and episodic, layered backing vocals over an immense, distorted industrial rhythm, passages of woodwind and beatless ambience, as if the arrangement is trying to express the dramatic shifts in mood that accompany emotional upheaval.
A Running Start takes longer to transform but by the end it resembles something akin to 60s sunshine pop, thick with vocal harmonies. Elsewhere, songs are consumed by synthesised bleeping or surge into Spector-esque walls of sound, or – in the case of Shit Talk – repeatedly rise out of a sparkling guitar figure into arrangements increasingly thick with brass and woodwind, before giving way to a lengthy, glacial, droning coda. The shifts never feel superfluous: they work together with the lyrics, which thrash about emotionally as people in the midst of emotional upheaval tend to, turning from desperate pleading – “Just say what you want” – to anger, to grim acceptance laced with mordant humour, to fear of the future: “There will be a terrible cost for all that we’ve left undone / Deliver me from everything I’ve put off.”
The only song that stays in one place for its duration is the concluding version of Neil Young’s There’s a World, which you could read as a sly piece of music criticism. The original was among the songs on 1972’s Harvest that Young unwisely smothered in melodramatic orchestration, complete with thundering timpani; Stevens’ beautifully understated take seems to carry the implicit suggestion that Young should have left well enough alone.
At the end of last month, Stevens revealed he was suffering from a rare autoimmune condition that had left him unable to walk: he is expected to make a full recovery, but is obviously unable to promote or tour his new album. It’s a tragedy on several levels, because Javelin feels like a triumphant culmination of sorts. Perhaps no album could tie together all the diverse strands of Stevens’ musical career but, as it ranges from lo-fi singer-songwriter to baroque orchestration to opaque electronics to warped pop, Javelin comes surprisingly close: a remarkable achievement in itself. That it sounds like a holisitic album, one that flows rather than fractures, is remarkable, too – but it does, carrying the listener along with it as it goes.
This week Alexis listened to
Sola – When I Feel Sane
From her debut album Warped Soul, When I Feel Sane is a headlong dive into a weird soundworld: avant-R&B production, powerfully jazzy vocals.
