Sufjan Stevens @ Sydney OperaHouse (27/01/11)

Fri 28th Jan, 2011 in Gig Reviews

Sensory overload. That’s the overall impression you get from over two hours of the bigger, badder Sufjan Stevens and it’s only the tip of a very large, complicated iceberg.

To celebrate the musically stuffed and sonically bursting Age Of The Adz, the former 50 States man brings on the excess, a word he will use in mid-song banter throughout the evening. He could have one demon drummer, but he has two, as well as dual trombonists, backing vocalists, keyboardists and whoever else he can fit onstage amidst all that gear. It’s well-known that Stevens is heavily into the Biblical, which may explain why he turns the concert hall into his own Noah’s Ark, albeit with every animal wearing fluoro, glow-in-the-dark space outfits that looks like a weird hybrid of George Clinton, a Sia music video and the next Outkast concept album.

Declaring war on his own sonic prettiness in 2010, Stevens makes good on the threat by levelling the Opera House with huge amounts of noise. From the opening strains of Too Much through to the delightful I Walked, Sufjan embraces his inner abstractionist but nonetheless remains utterly riveting to both watch and hear. It’s fascinating not only for the sheer force of the output but also to see how incredibly dense and well-rehearsed the material is. With his twin drummers bouncing complex rhythms off each other in perfect unison beneath a flood of banjo, synths and horns, Sufjan seems completely at home in the mess he’s created. The set focuses almost exclusively on Adz, but it’s the translation of the complicated themes and ideas that really come to life on stage which shift this perception. Indeed, as Sufjan readily admits, these are songs which are designed to be played live. That theory is augmented by the increasingly confident frontman, who has gone to the effort to choreograph awkward robot dance moves for himself, change costumes whenever the mood takes him and generally engage intimately with a very large audience.

By leaving out the much-loved Illinois material, Stevens takes a gamble which pays off in the flawless execution of some incredibly rich music that would put some seasoned prog-rockers to shame. At points, what with the insistent time changes and textural shifts, it seems like Stevens has written the ultimate space-age pop musical, a Hair for the Internet generation, to which only he knows the ending. As the rollercoaster he mapped out rockets towards oblivion, Sufjan’s crystal clear voice rings out above the din and reminds everyone why they paid such good money to be there in the first place. For even with the forays into art-rock and distortion and free jazz, Stevens is a melodist at heart and can turn the ugliest sounds into sweetness just by opening his mouth. Though he apologises for the folk songs of his past ‘Really short, I promise’, even the whacked-out, interplanetary-gazing Christian can’t escape what he really is; a damn good songwriter.

It’s easy to forget that fact with all the bells and whistles; the dancing back-up singers, the plastic-piano-toting hippies, the glitter, the deafening codas and the balloons which roll down the hall in an avalanche for the well-earned encore of Chicago. Ironically, while burrowing down the rabbit hole towards sounds rather than songs, Stevens manages to create the most groove-based, accessible riffs of his career. They even survive through his near-half hour exposition of Impossible Souls, which has the crowd on their feet dancing, cheering and clapping like Hillsong was never invented.

Quietly self-assured and utterly spell-bounding, Stevens is the headliner Sydney Festival had to have back. On no other level has one man managed to engage the feet, hearts and minds of such a diverse spread of people while continually sating our appetite for all things magical. Ten times better than on CD, twenty times better than on video, Sufjan is a star. Expect that impending musical to sell-out in minutes.