Sufjan Stevens Ushers Us Into The Age of Adz

Approximately 22 and one half minutes into “Impossible Soul”, the last track on Sufjan Steven’s new LP The Age of Adz, something strange happens. The dense electronic soundscape that dominates most of the 80-minute run time dies away and beautiful picking parts on a banjo and guitar remain. This shouldn’t sound strange to fans of almost any other Sujfan Stevens record, as he’s made his name in the last decade releasing LPs that sang about American heroes and lost love. (Anyone who was in high school 5 years ago can probably tell you about singing along with orchestral-influenced folk ‘hits’ like “Decatur, or a Round of Applause for Your Stepmother” and “Chicago” while driving around with friends.) The strange feeling comes because just 9 minutes before, Stevens gives us an auto-tuned vocal part that sounds like something R.Kelly or Kanye West might use before dropping a woofer-testing beat and a massive hipster sing-along. It’s hard to imagine those two things occurring on a record in less then 10 minutes, but it happens. Yet it almost feels like Stevens taking a bow, coming out behind the curtain after debuting his new sound and saying “See! It was me the whole time!” The Age of Adz takes the Sufjan Stevens experience to a new place, and while any kind of change can feel strange at first, this new direction might just be the stamp of the modern age.

It’s hard to talk about this album without going back 3 months ago to when Sufjan came out of nowhere and dropped the hour-long All Delighted People EP. The two versions of the new mini-epic and 5 other acoustic-driven folk songs were excellent reminders that Stevens continues to be indie-rock’s biggest overachiever. In an age where you can find 20 guys at any given open-mic night who fashion themselves the next big singer-songwriter, Stevens has always been ahead of the curve. His ambition with songwriting projects like “Greetings from Michigan” and the aforementioned breakthrough “Illinois” was apparent because of the sprawling length and incredible command of the craft of songwriting and arrangement. He’s also managed to write an experimental score to his film “The BQE” (yeah, the highway in NYC) and guest on records like “Dark Was the Night” and The National’s “Boxer” and “High Violet”. After four years since the release of “The Avalanche”, a record-long “Illinois” B-side, Sufjan released the EP on bandcamp.com without any prior promotion.

It made sense, then, that he would announce the coming of The Age of Adz because All Delighted People felt like a vehicle for him to show us how much tinkering he's done in the last few years. The EP ends with a 17+ minute song “Djohariah” that seems like an expanded version of a track called “Sister” from an earlier LP, the fantastic folk collection Seven Swans. (The titles are no coincide, given Djohariah is actually Sufjan’s sister. Great names those Stevens kids have.) Building up with a ripping guitar solo, the track drops into a proper “song” that features the clean guitar picking and pastoral harmonies we all love. Toward the chorus, however, a programmed beat appears and joins the guitar and vocal to bring the last minute of the song into an electro-folk realm. When I heard it for the first time, I was both moved and enlightened; the first came because I felt the song I just listed to contained everything that is good about music all in one, and the latter came because I instantly knew what any future Sufjan release was going to sound like.

It was no surprize that this new album does indeed ditch the banjo in favor of a beat machine. While the opening tune “Futile Devices” contains nothing but guitar and his-heavily reverbed voice, the just over-two minute track gives way to an electronic drop that sounds like something Aphex Twin might have left off one of his records back in the 90s. When the song actually starts and Sufjan's voice kicks in, the knob twisting only continues despite the familiar vocals on top. The tune itself could easily be played on just an acoustic guitar, and if he had written it a few years ago, absolutely would have been. But Sufjan definitely had his ear to the ground these last few years, and most of the tracks on the record would fit more on a mixtape with Animal Collective and Massive Attack and less on one with Bob Dylan or Andrew Bird.

The ambitious horn and string arrangement that made Illinois such an experience are no less present, however. The title track feels like listening to an orchestra, though it’s also impossible not to picture a few guys on laptops running Abelton Live and a MIDI synth sitting next to the conductor. Even slower ballads that would have fit on any other Stevens LP are followed with the trip-hop vibe of most of the rest of the set. Songs like “I Walked”, “All For Myself” and “Get Real Get Right” have legitimately dope beats under them, which is never something I thought could be said of a Sufjan Stevens song. Lyrically, this is really the first LP he’s released without a theme since his first (and mostly forgotten) record A Sun Came; even Seven Swans carried a predominately Christian-themed set of tunes. The Christian influence has come in and out of Sufjan’s songwriting, and “Get Real Get Right” finds him singing “I know I caused you trouble/I know I caused you pain/ But I must do the right thing/I must do myself a favor and/get real/get right/with the lord”, essentially a song about choosing the hard path over the easy and less-instantly-gratifying one.

Toward the end of the record comes “I Want to be Well”, which along with the final track might actually serve as the total summation of everything Sufjan Stevens has done up to this point. My personal favorite, its 6 and a half minutes can be thought of as two parts: The first half has a textbook-Sufjan lyric and melody with the backing female chorus and strings that call to mind the title track on Illinois. The only difference, of course, is the glitchy beat that replaces the Aaron Copland-esque piano we all loved 5 years ago. This leads into a guitar-vocal “breakdown”, where wet electronic sounds join the chorus as Stevens belts out over the top a verse that eventually ends with him wailing “I’m not fuckin around!” over and over as the entire bands kicks in for a truly moving ending. As if to truly seat the deal, the final track follows the same idea but has too many movements to count, with stylistic changes that verge right on the edge of ridiculous.

After about 7 or 8 complete listens to this in the last two weeks, I can’t help but compare this to another album: Radiohead’s Kid A. When it was first released in 2000, it was met with mixed reviews. Some correctly predicted it contained the sound of the future while others panned its departure from the brilliant rock songs that made Radiohead famous. Since that time, of course, it’s been almost universally recognized as one of the defining albums of the last decade, and influenced an entire generation of musicians. While it’s certainly too early to tell what The Age of Adz’s effect on music will be, one has to applaud Stevens for never settling for the expected. It's why he remains such a brilliant artist who will continue to surprise us for years to come.