Album Review: Sufjan Stevens “The Age of Adz”

Sufjan gets wildly personal, confuses folksy fan base

label: Asthmatic Kitty
release date:Oct. 12, 2010
our rating:86%
reviewer: AARON SCHRANK

Devotees have waited nearly five years for the triumphant return of indie-rock messiah Sufjan Stevens. They’ve been playing Michigan and Illinois on repeat, cooing along with tender tunes in strings-soaked canticles about picturesque state parks, clown-faced serial killers and obscure polish statesmen. Those who have been up nights contemplating whether Sufjan’s next modern-folk baroque concept album will capture the milieu of Rhode Island or Colorado will be sorely surprised by the decisions made, thematically and aurally, in his latest work. While bandwagon banjo-enthusiasts may feel abandoned by some of the album’s electronic exploration and beat-heavy tracks (not to mention Sufjan’s adventures in Auto-Tune in the final track), smarter listeners should skip the whole “lamenting the Sufjan of yore” phase and go straight to appreciating this ambitious and worthwhile work in all of its complexity. It’s more than likely, however, with its departure from Sufjan’s celebrated sound, that The Age of Adz will split audiences and individuals alike.

The Age of Adz is Sufjan’s most personal album to date—with first-person track titles like “I Walked” and “Now That I’m Older” failing to fit the established blueprint of long-winded, literary titles such as “Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out To Get Us” and “All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands.” The story-telling element stays strong in Adz, but the narrative positions Sufjan himself as the central character, rather than the story-teller. While not dubbed a concept album, the album is riddled with references to the late Royal Robertson, an artist, self-proclaimed prophet and paranoid schizophrenic who incorporated bizarre ideology including space travel, the apocalypse, biblical prophecy and misogyny into his work after his wife of 19 years left him for another man. It is Robertson’s art that graces the album’s front cover. Allusions to Robertson’s saga are most prominent in “I Walked,” title track “Age of Adz” and pagan-esque hymn “Vesuvius.” The Robertson story serves Sufjan primarily as a font of imagery to enrich the lyrical luster of his own first-person storyline. Track listing reads like the chapters of a new age self-help book. As Adz moves from track to track, it carries the audience through a complex character arc, from a painful inability to express love (“Futile Devices,” & “Too Much”) and an attempt to cope with desertion (“I Walked” & “Now That I’m Older”) to a desire for healing (“Get Real Get Right” & “All For Myself”) and a realization of optimistic joy (“Impossible Soul”). If there was any doubt that Sufjan was the Adz protagonist, it is hushed with “Vesuvius,” when his first name appears in the triumphant chants of this march-into-final-battle anthem: “Sufjan, follow the path/ It leads to an article of imminent death.” This personal journey element of the album is aided by uncharacteristic sporadic electronic and acoustic arrangements, some encouraging, and others exhausting, mirroring the ups-and-downs in the poetic plot of the album.

Adz is arguably not Sufjan’s most experimental or inaccessible album to date, but is perhaps his most diverse. 2001’s Enjoy Your Rabbit, an electronic IDM song-cycle with tracks based on Chinese astrological symbols, is an early example of Sufjan experimentation that would baffle his more folksy fans. That being said, Sufjan certainly does challenge listeners with this The Age of Adz. Three-minute acoustic ditties to satiate singer-songwriter fans are in short supply. In fact, “Impossible Soul” weighs in at a staggering 25:35, and is essentially 5 songs in 1, including the soon-to-be infamous Auto-Tuned material in the third “song” on the track. Listeners are likely to have a hard time deciding how they feel about this decision, as they’ve been exposed to a slew of R&B and pop artists (T-Pain, most famously) employing the gimmicky pitch-correction effect over the past several years. The perhaps aptly titled “Too Much” features an odd assortment of effects, tones and squelches all stacked on top of one another. “I Walked,” while more stripped down than some of the other tracks, prominently features a drum machine. With a host of new-fangled effects and classical arrangements all competing with each other on almost every track, the result is chaotic—even gaudy— but this should be expected from everyone’s favorite multi-instrumental maximalist.
Where Sufjan might lose the listeners instrumentally, he reels them back in with his haunting melodies and powerful lyrics. The fanciful phrasing and usage of literary devices that earned Sufjan praise years ago persists. Memorable lyrics include a line from “All For Myself”: “We set out once, with folded shirts, with hairy chest, and well-rehearsed. I want it all, I want it all for myself.” In “I Walked”: “I am already dead,” Sufjan announces, “but I’ve come to explain why I made such a mess on the floor.” The six and a half-minute “I Want To Be Well” produced a number of memorable lines: “A crowd of ages outside, dressed for murder,” Sufjan sings, likely harnessing hostilities endured by Royal Robertson as a result of his fanaticism. On the same track, Sufjan chants, “I’m not, I’m not fucking around,” repeatedly, a far cry from the content in his Christmas albums.

Audiences should definitely sit down and give this 75-minute album a decent evaluation, but The Age of Adz's power to generate division is apparent. If Sufjan fans who were pleased with his lengthy All Delighted People EP, released in August, expect more of the same from Adz, they are likely to be disappointed. It appears the EP (which is similar to Sufjan’s older work) may have been a political move, released to quell outrage regarding his new style from dogmatic fans. Those who enjoyed Sufjan’s cover of Castanets’ “You Are the Blood,” featured on the Dark Was The Night compilation, are likely to be friendlier to Sufjan’s new work. Sufjan, whose name means “comes with the sword,” did just that in The Age of Adz. Only time will tell how many people he’s managed to scare away.