Most Sufjan Stevens fans will have a preferred style for the multi-instrumentalist from Detroit.
It’s probably his wispy acoustic material, heard to best effect on 2015’s impossibly beautiful Carrie & Lowell album or the song Mystery of Love, which earned him an Oscar nomination for capturing the powerful erotic haze of the film Call Me By Your Name. But how about the stuff that sounds like something by Henry VIII’s court bard, or the epic electronic meanderings, or the many Christmas albums?
This long collection presents someone new: angry Sufjan. In interviews he has said he is “jaded and tired”, “disenchanted” and “so sick of folk music”. The 12-minute single, America, is cold, bleak and despondent, a songwriter who deals in the personal lamenting for a whole nation. Icy synths and drum machines replace any acoustic instrumentation, with Death Star and Landslide ending with busy clatters of beats. He sounds like early Depeche Mode on the surprisingly simple and catchy Video Game, while Lamentations has echoes of the Tears for Fears hit Mad World.
His voice is as soft and angelic as ever, but he seems to have thrown poetry out with his banjo. It’s strange to hear the man who made a song about the serial killer John Wayne Gacy sound sympathetic repeating “Come on baby give me some sugar” on Sugar.
He recites “I wanna die happy” while making it sound like it’s an impossibility. The album seems like a necessary release for him, a sound without hope for a hopeless time.
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