Sufjan Stevens
The Age of Adz Sufjan Stevens (Asthmatic Kitty)
An adz is a hand-tool, ancient in design, for dressing timber. It's not a fine implement, but may be a good metaphor for an album of songs about love and relationships. Who hasn't hacked at a difficult personal situation with an implement that was way too rough for the job?
Sufjan Stevens is a real fine-tool kind of musician. The Age of Adz, like his previous works, is delicately made and densely layered. But underneath the shimmering seductive surface (or rather, embedded in it), something harsh and even cruel is often just barely concealed. It's like the selfish desire nestled in sweet promises of devotion.
The interplay of those two is a big theme on this album, and Stevens treats them as inseparable forces that emerge and recede continually. He sings about them in a clear, calm voice, while his supporting instrumental music roils and heaves with their disruptive energy.
Impossible Soul is the magnus opus on this subject, a turbulent 25-minute odyssey that runs from dissatisfaction to cool appraisal to bold confidence, and ends with a coda that reverses the perspective and shows that the euphoria of the song's previous eight minutes was a delusion. "I'm nothing but a selfish man," Stevens concludes. "Did you think I'd love you forever?"
In Vesuvius, he sees passion as a volcano that will burn you if you get too close, though it might help to offer an appeasing prayer: "Vesuvius, O, be kind." Too Much makes a incessant mantra of its worrying chorus ("there's too much riding on that"), and in Futile Devices, intimacy is about security: "when I sleep on your couch, I feel very safe."
The music rolls out in obsessive variations, usually on a simple chord sequence from which endless counterpoints and textures grow to symphonic proportions. "Don't be distracted," Stevens sings over and over in Impossible Soul, while the frenetic instrumentals enact the distraction you're not supposed to give in to.
The arrangements feature the cascading woodwinds and exuberant strings and brasses familiar from previous Stevens albums, but there are also more synthesizers and drum machines than we've heard from him before. In a few places, he gets downright robotic, ironically in the case of the title line (also the chorus) of Get Real, Get Right.
The disc's angelic vocals often act as a foil for the yeasty commotions of the instrumentals. That's partly a function of Stevens's boyish tenor, but also of his fondness for close choral singing. At times (in Now That I'm Older or All for Myself, for instance) that cosy vocal cluster sounds like a refuge, a way of being with others that's clear and orderly. And that, ultimately, is what he seems to be after: a compassionate kind of social and intimate life, improbably located at the base of smoking Vesuvius.
The Age of Adz reaches stores on Tuesday.
Sufjan Stevens plays Montreal's Metropolis Theatre on Tuesday, Massey Hall in Toronto on Wednesday and Vancouver's Orpheum Theatre on Oct. 28.
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