2006, Asthmatic Kitty Records
Sufjan Stevens is yet another one of those experimental singer-songwriters that took some getting used to for me. It was evident to me that Stevens was quite different upon listening to the first track, ?The Avalanche,? which was filled with violins, horns and an interesting array of flutes. It sounded like a something you?d hear at Renaissance fair. In fact, most of the album could be described as singer-songwriter-material-meets-the-Renaissance-Fair. The songs I enjoyed the most were the slower Kings of Convenience-style acoustic tracks like ?Saul Bellow,? ?The Mistress Witch from McClure? and ?The Pick-up.? However, I also really enjoyed the faster and more upbeat trip-outs like ?Dear Mr. Supercomputer? and ?The Henney Buggy Band,? both of which made me want to get up and dance. Of course, there were also those feel-good songs that were just flat-out weird yet hard to dislike such as the hippie-esque tambourine-shaker ?Carlyle Lake? and the dream-pop clap-along ?No Man?s Land.? Then you had the crazy five-minute-plus tracks near the end like ?Pittsfield,? which goes from a nice acoustic-guitar-and-piano track to a circus-like freakout with closing distortion effects, and ?The Undivided Self,? which is a digitalized, psychedelic acid trip all the way through. I guess I could consider myself a minor fan of Surfjan Stevens, but like several experimental albums from independent singer-songwriters, this one ran a little too long (76 minutes) for my attention span. However, I do give Stevens credit for creating an album filled with brilliant weirdness, even though it will take me a while before I can listen to one of his albums all the way through. Nevertheless, this was another ?weird-in-a-good-way? experiment from an interestingly talented artist.