Sufjan Stevens- Illinois

Tue 5th Jul, 2005 in Music Reviews

Don’t be frightened by the Sufjan Stevens fact sheet: Prodigious Pentecostal Christian, Label Boss (Asthmatic Kitty Records), graphic designer, acclaimed short fiction author, teacher of knitting to the blind, multi instrumentalist fluent in oboe & banjo who, after recording an electro cycle of songs reflecting the Chinese calendar and a hushed folk set of doubt-in/ love-for God, returns to his 50 states series, where he sonically documents each state of America with his crazed and creepy chamber folk.

Freakish for sure, but essential nonetheless. Illinois is the second of the proposed (and perhaps doomed to fail) series, and isn’t hugely different to the first (2003’s Greetings From Michigan); stories of the dispossessed and disheartened sit alongside grander historical re-tellings of crucial events in the area’s past, but on Illinois everything that was once good is now great.
 
Be it his haunting biography of Chicago’s favourite clown-cum-serial killer John Wayne Gacy Jnr, the fuzzpop majesty of The Man of Metropolis..., opening tear jerker Concerning the UFO Sighting..., and the centrepiece Chicago, Stevens has crafted something immense, theatrical yet heartfelt, off-kilter yet full of love and beauty. It’s a record that slides by the listener due to the sheer weight of what’s contained in it (22 tracks, just shy of 80 minutes), song titles stretching to a paragraph, impossible to completely comprehend until one has digested it several times over, and by then it’s written on the inside of your eyelids and down your spine.

By that time you’ll also note some of more interesting po-mo elements, especially in the single Come On! Feel the Illinoise where the author, after four minutes of gleefully detailing the World Trade Expo of late 1800’s and the architecture of Lloyd Wright, breaks the beat down to sing of his own doubt re: what he’s doing, this 50 states thing, attempting to reflect and represent areas he doesn’t really know. The chants of his mini ladies choir ask if he’s ‘singing from the heart’, and he eventually responds with a yes. It’s an insane, unlikely, incredible moment in a record full of them. A record that really can’t be summarised nor receive requisite praise Just understand that you will clutch this record to your heart for some time indeed.