Where does our admiration of our favorite artists end and our sense of entitlement begin? Is there some indefinable gray area where our attitudes toward music dictate what we think an artist should release and what each release should sound like? Sufjan Stevens has been releasing massive, intelligent pop music for years and his fans have become used to the idea that his albums are going to strike all the right notes and all sound exactly like a Sufjan Stevens album should. But through our own musical history, as fans, there have been albums that sounded "different" from what we expected. These artists didn't give us what we wanted, or what we thought we wanted, but knew, that given enough time, we would come around and see their creation for what it was, their own unique take on their own sound. Bands like Radiohead, Liars, or The Magnetic Fields, just to name a few recent examples, have all released albums that left fans scratching their heads in a collective confusion, at least initially. The Age Of Adz may initiate that same kind of head-scratching. An album that draws its inspiration from a self-proclaimed prophet, who expresses an internal fury through cartoonish drawings and apocalyptic subtext, should have been a conceptual mess but through his experience and musical reflexes, The Age Of Adz bends any given expectations and creates a shifting, always altering, view of reality. Stevens has never tread this darkly a path before on any of his albums. And lyrically so, as well; these songs inhabit a cautious, nervous world where the energetic optimism of his other albums is left behind, to be replaced with a guarded animosity. It's all pretty curious subject matter for Stevens. Songs like the opening beauty of "Futile Devices"and the not-so-thinly-veiled sarcasm of "Get Real Get Right" display the acrobatic ways in which Stevens connects his past work with this newer, fiercer view of life. And then after all this newly broken ground, we come to closer "Impossible Soul", a 25-minute amalgam of Steven's newfound anxiety, which swirls around the listener in a heady cacophony. And while the length may initially draw conclusions of pretension, the tiered layers within allow the song to expand and contract naturally, the instruments and electronics twirling in parallel. Stevens has never shied away from grand musical statements; hell, his last album contained song titles comprising upwards of 50 words. And The Age Of Adz continues this streak of fascination with bold, sweeping musical strokes, and though darker in scope than previous albums, it never sinks into a deadened malaise. But while we may never know the truth behind the cryptic mind of Adz muse Royal Robertson, we do know that Stevens has taken that lonesome, wandering anger and turned it into something unique and fleetingly acknowledged, some specific point just on the edge of our periphery, where we feel a common bond with those eccentrics who see more than we ever could, some distant point in the future. The Age Of Adz has come and we're ready.
Tracklisting:
01. Futile Devices
02. Too Much
03. Age of Adz
04. I Walked
05. Now That I’m Older
06. Get Real Get Right (listen to the mp3 below)
07. Bad Communication
08. Vesuvius
09. All for Myself
10. I Want to Be Well
11. Impossible Soul
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