Review Summary: Where Sufjan Stevens destroys everything that won't make him more like....Sufjan Stevens.
Sufjan Stevens is an enigma. An enigma that has puzzled the indie community for years. He's worn butterfly wings to his concerts, actual butterfly wings, with sparkles. and while wearing these wings he sings songs about Jesus...on his banjo. Well, to be more clear, a banjo and an entire orchestra, accompanied with a piano, a keyboard, female backup singers, kazoos, xylophones, flutes, trumpets, saxophones, trombones, and drums...but still he sings songs about Jesus while playing a banjo, that doesn't change. Neither does the fact that he's made a 2 hour album of christmas music. (Its a commonly known fact that everyone hates christmas music.) He's written symphonies about beat up highways, composed techno based on the chinese year system. And five years after leaving the entire music business with their jaws on the floor over an album of glorified folk music, Sufjan Stevens has released the delighted people EP. Which unsurprisingly, completely ignores any preconceived definitions of what an EP is supposed to be in the first place.
There are a few fundamental differences between this EP and Illinois. The music is darker in tone, the melodies more complex. His themes are no longer clearly religious, but more clearly about life, death, and relationships. and the hooks? F*** the hooks, you won't find yourself singing along to these songs quite as easily. His arrangements are more grandiose than ever, almost to the point of being overdone. Not to mention the track lengths. This is an hour long EP where two songs take up an entire half of the record. The whole record is pretentious. It completely ignores all the criteria in which critics will judge his music, recklessly ignores all the rules which have been established for indie folk, and surprisingly even ignores the rules which Sufjan has been following while making his music all these years.
But Sufjan has never cared about any of these rules. Sufjan displays in this record something far more valuable than traditional melodies and hooks, than self-control, even more valuable than appropriate track times. His music displays an integrity which is rarely found in music these days. Even more so, it displays a playfulness, unrestraint from expectations, guidelines, or any barriers whatsoever. Amazingly, it is clear he made this record because he simply enjoyed making music, and he let that enjoyment take him wherever it needed to take him.
It displays a beautiful kind of child-like innocence, or maybe better put a child-like confidence. A confidence that allows you to try to tackle a project as huge and impossible as the 50 states project, a confidence to try and make people buy 2 hours of christmas music, the child-like confidence we were all mesmerized by as we listened to the compositions of Michigan and Illinois. Nowhere is that unrealistic confidence personified in his work more significantly than it is during the ten minute guitar solo in Djoharia, or when the piano and banjo fades into synthesizers in "From The Mouth Of Gabriel", or in the idea to include his sloppy 11 minute masterpiece "All Delighted People" twice in the same EP. And hell making an EP even last an hour is a pretty good display of it as well.
The records not perfect by any means. The songs would benefit from being edited down, "Enchanting Ghost" and "Arnika" are more or less throw away tracks, and that clunky collage that graces the album cover...enough said there. But at the end of the record, with my headphones sprawled on the floor, the first thought that came to my head was..
"damn, he might be a genius after all."
4 out of 5
