Review Summary: All Delighted Peoples raised their hands and said finally!!!
It has been a long five years since Sufjan Stevens’ magnum opus “Illinois”, especially for the mounds of fans and critics who have been waiting for real material since. Has Sufjans musical creativity grown with the passing of time? Or has Sufjan Stevens creativity withered away to the history of time along with the Pony Express?
Fortunately for everyone, the answer belongs with the former rather than the later.
The EP starts off with the grandiose album track (All Delighted People) that sounds like it very well could have been placed somewhere in Illinois. The reason being, are the complicated musical scores involved and the seemingly staple choir accompaniment. However, it is noticeable that Sufjans voice has definitely matured since Illinois. Sufjans’ new mature voice has allowed him to create fuller melodies that flow much more seamless than it did in Illinois, perhaps too seamless, more on that later.
The next two songs (Enchanting Ghost/Heirloom) are reminiscent of his more stripped down songs played mostly on acoustic guitar. Sufjans’ guitar play has incredibly gotten better, now with more complex finger plucking rhythms while also including pull offs and hammer-ons . See the songs “Arnika” and “Djoharia”, for they have some of the best sporadic guitar riffs Sufjan has ever devised.
The composition of even the less grandiose songs of this EP still sport amazing piano accompaniment that help carry the atmosphere whether it be fun and innocent or more slow and haunting (The Owl and the Tanager).
In the track “From the Mouth of Gabriel” we will notice that Sufjan is using more experimentation using electronic samples. This is good for experimentation; however, it still needs to be more refined in the future, for it doesn’t fit the mood/atmosphere of the song quite right. Also, there is an alternate version of the album track called the “Classic Rock Version” which is a more upbeat version of the original plus massive electronic experimentation that makes this version a lot less natural than the original.
As for the album closer “Djoharia”, it is a behemoth of a song, being seventeen minutes in length. This closer essentially has three parts. The groovy guitar/choir intro, and then it explodes into a choir chanting “Djoharia Djoharia” for quite some time and then the final part is when Sufjan Stevens comes in and finishes off the rest of the song in his signature falsetto voice.
The only real cons I can think of rather than the misuse of electronic sampling are the melodies used in the EP. Like I mentioned earlier, Sufjans now matured voice allows him to create melodies that are much more seamless than they were in Illinois. This makes the melodies less easily to follow or to put it simply, less fun. In Illinois, we were given simple melodies that were easy to sing a long like in “Chicago”, “John Wayne Gacy Jr”, and “Casimir Pulaski Day” but none of those is to be found in this EP. This is possibly due to the fact that the compositions are much more complex and require more free verse melodies.
Altogether Delighted Peoples EP is perhaps the largest most grand EP I have heard in quite some time, clocking in around an astonishing hour of incredible ingenuity and a good heaping of experimentation. If this is where Sufjan Stevens is heading musically then it’s the right direction. 3.8/5
