Plumbiferous Media

Five years after his last LP, Illi­nois, thor­oughly pop­u­lar indie singer-songwriter Suf­jan Stevens will release his newest album, The Age of Adz, in early Octo­ber. The Age of Adz, while it keeps some of the sound of Stevens’s ear­lier albums, is a bit of diver­gence from style, espe­cially when com­pared to Illi­nois’s ele­gantly ebul­lient sound. This new style cer­tainly has some suc­cess, but it’s hard not to feel that Stevens has aban­doned some of what made his music great, leav­ing The Age of Adz gen­er­ally inter­est­ing but never quite absorbing.

Stevens takes a vari­ety of instru­men­tal approaches on The Age of Adz, each of which is gen­er­ally quite suc­cess­ful. The first of these approaches is “Futile Devices“‘s del­i­cately plink­ing intro - a con­stant sound, but one which is well-accented both by Stevens’s voice and by slight changes in the sound, both of which pre­vent the track from going old. After “Futile Devices,” the sound of sec­ond track “Too Much” is a bit of a shock. “Too Much” uses the same mel­low tone as its pre­de­ces­sor, but with a new, slightly glitch-influenced elec­tronic tone. From there, The Age of Adz goes through a num­ber of other styles - and with con­trasts like that between “Vesuvius“‘s inti­mate piano-driven sound and “Get Real Get Right“‘s gen­tly pump­ing quasi-electric style, it never gets boring.

Suf­jan Stevens’s music is noth­ing with­out his joy­fully bright voice, and The Age of Adz is accord­ingly graced with his tones. In cer­tain places - for exam­ple, the entirety of album opener “Futile Devices” - Stevens’s voice is just as sub­lime as it has been on his ear­lier work. Unfor­tu­nately, as the album pro­gresses, Stevens’s voice becomes more and more clouded and obscured by var­i­ous elec­tronic ele­ments and ill-advised effects. Occa­sion­ally the for­mer state shows up, gen­er­ally in the best parts of the album - but too often, Stevens’s voice sim­ply isn’t allowed to shine through as it should be. The worst is unde­ni­ably the 25-minute gar­gan­tuan “Impos­si­ble Soul,” where Stevens’s voice suf­fers a hefty appli­ca­tion of Auto-Tune.

The Age of Adz is a bit less lyri­cally metaphoric than some of Stevens’s ear­lier work, but that doesn’t stop it from being quite well-written. High­lights of the album’s ele­gant approach to imagery and mean­ing include the sim­ple but clearly mean­ing­ful “Our words / Are futile devices” as well as the much less sim­ple but equally evoca­tive “Vesu­vius / Are you ghost / Or the sym­bols of light / Or a fan­tasy host?” Both do an excel­lent job of draw­ing not only the images they con­tain but a lyri­cal back­ground to their respec­tive tracks, and it says quite a lot that The Age of Adz has quite a few lines like these.

Taken alone, The Age of Adz is cer­tainly an inter­est­ing album. Given that it’s Suf­jan Stevens’ return to full albums after five years of intrigu­ing but not quite sat­is­fy­ing projects like The BQE, it’s even more so. While the Age of Adz doesn’t quite stand up to the stan­dard set by Stevens’s ear­lier albums, that doesn’t make it a fail­ure. Instead, it’s a step in a new direc­tion - a direc­tion that may not be entirely advis­able, but an inter­est­ing direc­tion nonetheless.

This post is tagged 70-79, Sufjan Stevens