ORIGINAL RELEASE DATE: OCTOBER 11TH 2010


The obstructions surrounding the release of Sufjan Stevens’ The Age Of Adz are now well documented. As perhaps indie’s most beloved and overwhelmingly restless artist, Stevens somehow allowed five years to pass by since the release of the towering Illinois. There were rumours of an extended hiatus and then the revelation of the mysterious and debilitating illness that invaded his body. Of course, he was also busy with other things. In a review of All Delighted People which preceded both The Age Of Adz and this assessment of it herein by a mere seven weeks, I referred to this conglomerate of expeditions as musical stepping stones through which Stevens was attempting to comprehend his lofty position as indie’s poster boy in relation to his already vast output, and how to take this forward without stagnating.


That EP hinted at the direction this record would take with songs such as Djohariah and twin versions of the comprehensive title track tackling ever-complex and winding structures, yet none of this truly forecast the music we would hear on Adz (pronounced ‘odds’). The whole record throbs with electronic impulses, drum beats and deep bass. On reflection, Stevens’ underrated 2001 instrumental album Enjoy Your Rabbit acts as a sort of blueprint for Adz and its flourishes of experimentalism. Yet it’s still unmistakably a Sufjan Stevens record; it’s bold, epic, brave and incredibly dynamic. It sounds like no one else and furthermore, like no one else could have made it.


Adz is such a left turn, such a significant departure from the sound for which Sufjan Stevens had become well known. The acoustic, finger-picking ruminations of Illinois and Michigan were expertly crafted while evoking a beautiful air of simplicity and genuine reverie. The former inparticular is so deeply rooted in the history of its subject matter that every single composition - from the spectacle of Chicago’s triumphant brass to John Wayne Gacy, Jr.’s chilling introspection - actually felt as though it were carried on the wind from the state it grew out of. With the 50 States Project abandoned, Stevens’ leap to a more electronic landscape hardly feels fortuitous. Technology is dictating more and more how we listen to and access music. This became a major predicament for Stevens in the years that followed Illinois, and so it seems his way to combat it was to truly embrace it. Adz is a record made entirely because it had to be made at this time. He has expressed little in the way of apology for the direction his music has taken, effectively calling on people to not listen to or buy it should they dislike what they hear. Referring to himself as something of an “aesthetic nightmare,” Stevens is either the most audacious songwriter of the present day or simply bitter about confounding expectations. I wouldn’t care to say which.


Adz is Stevens’ most personal and self-referential record to date and it’s a fact that he plays on to great effect. His plight is one of a man trapped between the relentless uncertainty about his place in the world, his well-being and his mortality. On Vesuvius, he embodies the volcano as a means for catharsis and release (“Sufjan / Follow your heart / Follow the flame / Or fall on the floor”). Elsewhere, on I Want To Be Well, he hurtles through six minutes of electronic spasms and percussive eruptions, warning us that he is indeed ‘not fucking around’ no less than sixteen times as well as rolling around his tongue the elusive phrasings of “I want to be well / I want to be / Well, I want to be well.” It smacks of total sincerity and a feeling that this shift in style is thus established and intends to be built upon with further recordings. Lead single I Walked swells with layered vocals and wonderfully ethereal choral arrangements filtered through prisms of electronics. It’s fitting that its successor, the stunning Now That I’m Older, elaborates these choral elements and whisks them into a dense, swirling mass of piano and reverb.


Throughout Adz, Sufjan aligns himself to the American artist and self-professed ‘prophet’ Royal Robinson, a figure plagued by mental illness whose death became his undoing. His sketches and collages dominate the album’s inner artwork and provide the perfect visual accompaniment to the style of electronics mastered throughout. Whether it’s the muted distortion of shorter pieces such as Bad Communication and All For Myself or the soaring orchestral flourishes of the galactic title track, a definite auditory schizophrenia pervades the whole record to the point of relative absurdity. Get Real Get Right feels like Disney On Ice as it crashes and burns in a wonderfully heady mix of electronics and brass. Too Much, meanwhile, is a song of two halves and as a result could’ve trimmed its pompous ditherings by a few minutes. But it’s exactly these prolonged exultations that mark Stevens as such a musical prodigy. There’s always been a fine line between the ridiculous and the sublime throughout all his work, yet here it strikes as altogether more pressing. It may be a leap of the imagination to liken Stevens to Robinson, yet there are striking similarities on some level. For one, the unwavering need to continue creating work in whatever form. It provides a much needed platform to a record that is always flying off into orbit.


Nowhere is Stevens’ passion more convincing than on the beastly closing track, the didactic Impossible Soul. Of course it’s overblown, it’s twenty five minutes long! But more importantly it’s beautiful and majestic. It’s sincere and honest. It’s untamed and plain barking mad. The pacing of it is expertly rendered with time taken to accentuate a certain melody, or the repetition of phrases to the point of becoming suffused into the fabric of time gradually passing. There are more ideas bulging out of this song than in the entire output of most band’s careers, and it’s between the shifts of its five main portions that it bristles with life and movement. As it recalls the album’s opening track (the all too brief Futile Devices) with musings on a former love, it concludes that, indeed, through his trials and tribulations, Stevens is still aimlessly wandering. All you can do is dance. After all, it’s not so impossible.


Adz is ultimately all about impulses. Its resulting world tour saw Stevens studying pop concerts and analysing dance routines replete with neon bodysuits and vocal trickery, wholeheartedly embracing the physical and the joy of movement as a means of engaging his audience. Adz doesn’t give any easy answers, nor does it leave you with any resolution. It’s the sound of an artist truly pushing himself, extending way beyond both his vocal and physical capabilties to try anything new, throw it into the mix and see what comes out. There aren’t enough people doing this and it’s the most readily improvised and sincere offering that an alternative indie musician has given the world in years. Everyone is so concerned with getting it just right. Maybe Sufjan got it totally wrong, maybe he fell flat on his face, but what came out of his confusion was a startling coherence. This instinctive courage has clearly served him very well and The Age Of Adz is already positioned to become a classic record, serving very much as a groundbreaking reminder of one artist’s unique and singular progression.