Review Summary: The Avalanche represents something that’s only possible in the wake of an album like Illinois: A b-sides collection that would be a formidable release on its own.
It certainly is no exaggeration to claim that The Avalanche, a collection of b-sides from the Illinois album, stands deeply in the shadow of its mother release, given that on this very page, it merely has a tenth (!) of the number of votes. It’s astonishing to think how many fans of Illinois (the 5.0 ratings for that album alone are more than double the overall ratings for this one) have never heard this. This is even more interesting considering the direction things very well could have gone in; after all, Sufjan Stevens once proclaimed that he considered making Illinois a 50 track double album. Admittedly, that claim can also be interpreted as another one of his jokes, carrying the (in itself absurd) idea of the "50 States Album Project" to extremes by releasing one of them as an immensely beefy double album - but either way, it’s worth thinking about it: What would have happened if he had done it that way? What kind of an album would Illinois have been with the inclusion of what can be found on The Avalanche? Obviously, it would have been jarringly long (well over 2 hours), but - would it hold up?
Well, it would – for the most part. There are parts on The Avalanche that make you wonder how they weren’t included on the album … and Stevens has the answer: "… a lot of this stuff either just was too cumbersome, or it didn’t work stylistically with the rest of the songs." At least the second part of that explanation makes perfect sense: A lot of this album’s songs are bright, joyous, you could call them anthemic at times, with a certain leaning to a healthy amount of cheese in some places (the most blatant example being the beginning of Adlai Stevenson, featuring a patriotic, nearly parodistic, but at the same time wonderfully multi-layered brass arrangement). That wasn’t quite Illinois’s way. It seems like Stevens was aiming for more of a night-time atmosphere for the Illinois album, a deep blue tone after the more turquioise tone that dominated Michigan. The songs found on The Avalanche seem to lean to the middle between those. None of them have the night-time stage musical feeling of half of the Illinois tracks, they tend to be more minimalistic, the album featuring a higher-than-average number of soft, laid-back songs (like Saul Bellow), even though most of them sooner or later emerge into a more lofty sound (like No Man’s Land, The Mistress Witch from McClure, and the title track, among others). Because of this, a connection to the also comparatively calm Michigan album seems more evident, but even then, this release is not as sleepy, not as dreamy, more extroverted and quirky – particularly the more out-there tracks, like the robotic Dear Mr. Supercomputer, the up-beat and particularly catchy The Henney Buggy Band or the instrumental Inaugural Pop Music for Jane Margarete Byrne, which evokes the sound of N64 era video game soundtracks.
Besides those, there are two other kinds of oddities found on this release. For one, there are several short instrumental tracks, which is a thing not unheard of on Illinois (even though this release has no 6 second-long "woo-hoo"s), but once again, this album seems to be more in line with something found on Michigan: In there, Sufjan set to music the Tahquamenon Falls, using a xylophone to mimic the falling water drops. Here, he proceeds in a similar way when he makes fast, multi-layered guitar plucking imitate the flow of Kaskaskia River. There’s also a tornado that seems to hit Crystal Lake, portrayed by sinister, simple piano melodies with a dissonant soundscape behind. Tracks like these or the equally picturesque visit of Saint Dargarius and His Squadron of Benevolent Butterflies are little curiosities that feature instrumental experimentation and - as a soundtrack to the images hinted at in their titles - can be seen as predecessors to his soundtrack project a few years later, The BQE, in which he set out to intonate the chaos of a drive down the Brooklyn Queens Expressway in a not dissimilar way.
The other curiosity is hard not to notice at first glance at the track listing: There are three versions of Chicago on this release, a decision which might seem unreasonable - and it is. There is no reason why you would listen to three versions of the same song over the course of one album, but then again, this is where it becomes obvious that it is merely a b-sides collection. One cannot help but feel like Stevens deliberately put them there to make a point how - to quote the album art - “shamelessly compiled” the album is. That said - unnoted that there are too many of them - the three versions of Chicago admittedly aren’t half bad. While none of them reach the lush, dreamy quality of the version on the Illinois album, the Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version holds up as exactly what it claims to be, a smooth, not as overwhelmingly extensive, much more modest version that is a pleasure to listen to. The Multiple Personality Disorder Version is obviously a joke and has certainly annoyed some fans of the original. This rendition heavily relies on dissonant background guitars and at the very least succeeds in being an interesting, unorthodox take on the song. The Acoustic Version however, while well-performed, doesn’t feel as well-rounded. The main melody of the song is too joyous, too victorious to translate well into a setting of a melancholic acoustic piece with emotional female backing vocals - this version, while worth a listen for those who like the original, takes itself a tad too seriously.
All of this considered, there’s an odd feeling that remains when listening to this album or writing about it, given that, in 2005, Sufjan said about the left-overs of Illinois: "I’ll just leave them on my computer." Once again, not everything he says can be taken at face value, but the thought of all these tracks being lost on his laptop feels strange - too much work has been put into them. I already mentioned the multi-layered instrumentation of the Adlai Stevenson song as an example, and the catchiness of The Henney Buggy Band, but there is much more to find, like the quirky No Man’s Land (adding one beat after each fourth measure), and the two true highlights of this release, both ironically having similar names: Springfield is a heart-felt acoustic guitar-based piece with a strong vocal performance, a memorable chorus and two heavily distorted guitar solos, one of them noisy and upfront, the other one more subtle and careful, like a subdued version of the former one. Pittsfield, on the other hand, is one of the tender pieces with a lofty last act mentioned above. This song sets itself apart from the other ones due to a particularly strong build-up, making extensive use of ascending melodies that create a cathartic feeling. These two tracks are on par with the better ones on Illinois, the only reason why they weren’t included probably being that they didn’t really fit the (breezy) air of that album all that much.
In the end, it’s pretty hard to find concluding words about The Avalanche, since it, as a b-sides collection, isn’t as much of an album experience as it’s just a collection of (albeit high-quality) only thematically related songs. There are soft, melancholic tracks like those Stevens is loved for, there are more quirky and lofty sections, little experimental instrumental pieces, and three different Chicago versions. How to sum up an overall impression like that? Well, it’s probably best to say that, even though it’s not a consistent album experience in itself, The Avalanche still has its fair share of memorable moments and shows a great attention to detail - both of which would have been completely fine for a regular release. Instead, it’s a b-sides collection, and that’s the best conclusion I can give: That with The Avalanche, Stevens has proven that only an album like Illinois can spawn a b-sides collection like this, and that only a musician like Stevens would put that much effort into twenty tracks and then consider leaving them on his computer for noone to hear.
Fortunately, he didn’t.
