The Age of WTFz
The problem I have with Sufjan Stevens isn’t his music, which tends to either live up to its vaulted ambitions (Illinoise) or fall flat on its ‘experimental’ face/phase (Run Rabbit Run). The problem is Stevens himself.
He’s made up to be this indie wunderkind, soft-spoken and sensitive, the man/boy of every hipster girl’s dream. He’s this quirky musical prodigy, the black sheep in the New Weird America family—Christian, clean-cut, ‘complicated’.
The 50 states project was impossible from the start—c’mon—and all of a sudden he became the poster child for all that leftfield (as far as Pitchfork could go) stuff. His music will be whispering from the speakers of some independent bookstore/coffee shop downtown, being ‘different’ yet not quite from the other bands on their iTunes list. Perfect music for reading, writing but not arithmetic.
That’s the problem with Sufjan Stevens—and The Age of Adz did nothing to change that. If anything, Stevens found his niche and burrowed deeper into it. The album is mediocre at best; there’s everything you’d expect from Stevens…and nothing much else.
The press are calling it a ‘return to form’, but only ‘cause of the tragedies that were that stupid Rabbit album and the inexplicable one about an expressway (an expressway!). All just to put a tick next to “experimental phase” in career trajectory checklist, no doubt.
Stevens’ chamber pop tricks get tiring (cue choir, brass instruments, et al.) and there’s nothing on The Age of Adz to redeem all those maximalist embellishments. It’s just too much. We know you’re ‘different’, Sufjan, but you’re not that different.
That said, “All Delighted People” from the EP before this album is a really good song.
