Review Summary: Folk's favorite nice guy breaks tradition with varied results.
1. Futile Devices 4/5
Good opener, reminds me a lot of Concerning the UFO Sighting and Illinois in general.
2. Too Much 4/5
Bringing in some Kid A noises that are way different from Sufjan's usual likable folk sensibilities, not straying too far from the path just yet. Ol' Suffy sounds like a pretty needy guy. Cracking open my first Pepsi of the evening.
3. Age of Adz 2/5
The RC plane that took off at the beginning of this album just came to a smashing halt in your mom's gardenias as Mr. Stevens imitates a vastly sexier singer over something that sounds like a Looney Toons intro mixed with Throbbing Gristle's "20 Jazz Funk Greats" and another sound that sounds distinctly like Sonic the Hedgehog charging up his rolling attack thing. This song just sort of meanders with no real conclusion.
4. I Walked 3/5
This song restores a little of the atmosphere that the previous song wrung out, but I can't shake the feeling that Suffy is using the exact same Casio keyboard I had as a pre-pubescent and is similarly fascinated with the laser noises it made. Can't tell if this is supposed to be one of his Christian allegory songs.
5. Now That I'm Older 2/5
Immediately can't stop thinking of that line in Arcade Fire's "Wake Up" and my ex-girlfriend whose iTunes had over 1,000 plays of that song in three months in mid-2009. This album is sounding like Sufjan's attempt to be Thom Yorke; a phase I suppose every alternative artist is entitled to (some never leave it, looking at you Chris Martin). His vocals made me dizzy, and not in a good way.
6. Get Real Get Right 4/5
Song begins with "I know you want it." Is Sufjan channelling his inner Robin Thicke? I'd like to see him grind up on Miley Cyrus with butterfly wings and a banjo strapped to him. Manages to recapture some of Illinois' flute-fed whimsy and breed it with a drum machine mentality. Good use of the talkbox, I wish he'd say "intergalactic planetary."
7. Bad Communication 3/5
I probably would have convinced myself that this album was the greatest thing put to music when I was 17. But now with my jaded adult ears all I hear is bleeps and bloops that distract from what could have otherwise been an okay short-ish song. I keep hearing video game noises throughout this album, this time it's the Q*bert jumping noises. Can't think about that without thinking about Wreck-It Ralph, which is the best animated movie I've seen in a while.
8. Vesuvius 5/5
Suffy seems at his best when he's drawing upon his well-worn formulas; this song brings John Wayne Gacy Jr. to mind (the song, not the person. ***, now I'm thinking about clowns). I enjoyed the distorted oboe (I think) solos throughout. This is the first song where the lyrics stick out; Sufjan mentions himself in third person as he likens himself to Dante descending into a real world inferno that butt***ed Pompeii and other less-remembered Roman cities into oblivion. What's his motivation though? If he's Jeff Mangum what's his Anne Frank? Maybe he thinks his God destroyed Pompeii for porn-related reasons. How Victorian of him. So far this is the only song that I want to give another listen to.
9. All For Myself 2/5
I wouldn't be able to pick this song out of a police lineup that solely consisted of this album's tracklist. My math homework is never getting done.
10. I Want to Be Well 4/5
This album is a rollercoaster with not horribly sharp twists or turns that you only rode because the line was short; every time your hopes are let down by a less than brilliant song something cool comes along to pick you back up. This song could find a home in a trendy car commercial, and proves that this album's endgame isn't quite as bad as I thought it was going to be. Not even the shock of Sufjan blatantly and repeatedly throwing f-bombs shakes the funky cool of this song's multiple movements.
11. Impossible Soul 1/5
Agh, I have to sit through twenty-five minutes of this? Frank Zappa once said something to the effect of "all the good music has already been written by guys wearing wigs;" I think that should be the determinate of whether or not you can release a song that stretches longer than seven minutes. Metallica's "One" clocks in at 7:27, that should be the limit. Seriously, I think he just wrote like four different songs and mashed them together; Suffy's attempt at Space Oddity probably wastes space on the iPods of everyone who bought this album. AND IT STILL STRETCHES ON. Fifteen minutes to go, this is the musical equivalent of being forcefed sour cream. I suppose now is the time to comment on the similarities I see between Sufjan and Rivers Cuomo, this whole album feels like some sort of bizarre, inverted yet still highly introspective Pinkerton, if you make all of Pinkerton's references to girls really abstract and vaguely religious and make gratuitous use of talkbox. Seriously, if you want to hear a good song that's over ten minutes, go listen to Weird Al Yankovic's "Albequerque." Much like the end of this review, the last three minutes of Impossible Soul are salvageably good, but they are in no way worth listening to the other twenty-***ing-two minutes. The ending sounds like it uses the same chord pattern as the National's "I Need My Girl." They had a contest for people to cover that song for Valentine's Day and I totally forgot to do it.
Overall - 3.5/5
It's always good for an artist to resist pumping the same album out time after time with minimum effort and maximum monetary gain (cough cough Weezer) and Sufjan Stevens seems to be doing just that by adding computerized beats and robot orgy noises into his tried-and-true bizarro folk formula. However, Mr. Stevens finds himself in a territory akin to Jean-Claude Van Damme doing the splits between two Volvos (ever notice how much that sounds like "vulva?") as he straddles the line between remaking Illinois and creating his own Kid A. In the end, Adz just feels derivative of too many concepts, and your time would be better spent listening to the records he attempts to emulate: Talking Head's "Remain in Light" or Radiohead's "Amnesiac" for the electronic bleepity bloopity, or "Illinois," the Antlers' "Hospice," or Bright Eyes' "I'm Wide Awake, it's Morning" for heartstringing folk goodness.
