Sufjan Stevens - Age of Adz

I've only listened to this once or twice...it's quite alot to digest, I do like the quieter moments though!

i'm not excited to hear this. i'm not sure why. i liked michigan and illinoise, and it's been a long time since he's released a new full-length, so i'm fairly sure i'm not fatigued by his style.

yeah I won't be buying this

I miss taking trips to Decatur and crying for freedom but 2005 is not 2010

Haven't heard much about this yet - is it more of the same soundwise?

for the most part, the soundscape is early era synth - so it's alot of broad strokes of huge sounding analog keyboards. Some of the songs feel overly crowded/it's when all the backing music disappears and the songs are allowed to breath/that's when it really works. 'Vesuvius', 'I Want To Be Well', 'I Walked', 'Age of Adz' and the opener, 'Futile Devices' are the standouts at this point. I think this will be a transitional work for Mr. Stevens or the beginning of a long period of silence in terms of album output....

quite overblown on 1st listen.

i want to be well sounds like radiohead

wait what happened to south dakota! a little south of north dakota!?

or my washing weighs a ton ? or montana, my havana?

He's not going to tour this, is he?

it's just too much all of the time - too many instruments, much too long most of the time, too many badly programmed synths. and too many piccolo trills.

quite overblown on 1st listen.

― nonightsweats, Sunday, September 26, 2010 8:54 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

SHOCKING.

This is streaming at NPR right now. It's really good. Restraint is not this guy's strongsuit but if you like Illinois you should like this. There are synths, but it's not like he turned into The Human League or something. It still sounds like a Sufjan Stevens record.

boring shit is boring

HA ha this is wild!

Ian Slagowski (feed_the_world_with_PEZ) wrote:
This is a bloody brillant album. To me it speaks volumes of the overstimulation people are faced with today. Pure genius.

Furthermore, I think it has nicely bridged the gap for the vacuum left by groups like Dntl, Styrofoam and The Postal Service. Music has to continue progress in new directions to survive and I believe Sufjan will be studied and emulated for many more years to come.
Mon Sep 27 2010 23:19:32 GMT-0500 (Central Daylight Time)

can that void ever really be filled?

can Ian Slagowski ever really be overstimulated?

Has some great moments, but as others mentioned, is a bit overblown and often striving to sound ambitious and epic for the sake of sounding ambitious and epic. Whereas, the All Delighted People EP occasionally pulled that off....the last track Djohariah is amazing. That said, would his fans be happy or bored if he continued making the 50 states albums in the same style of Michigan or Illinois? I admire his need to progress, but I would kinda love to see these new ideas explored in an album about Texas, New York or even the freak states Alaska and Hawaii.

Lyrically, I'm not finding Age Of Adz to be as immersive or intriguing as his earlier stuff. His dedication to finding the heart of a state through it's history and people is what made him so interesting to me in the first place. There was something courageous and probably foolish about his 50 states project, which made it easy to romanticize him as an explorer and chronicler of America. These new songs are more personal, first person narratives, which should, in theory, be hitting me on a more emotional level.....but so far, it just seems a slightly chaotic, samey sounding mess.

i'm not excited to hear this. i'm not sure why. i liked michigan and illinoise, and it's been a long time since he's released a new full-length, so i'm fairly sure i'm not fatigued by his style.

― Daniel, Esq.

Same thing here which I find very strange. Five years ago I thought he was great, now I very rarely listen to his stuff and I'm not excited at all to hear anything about him. The honeymoon's over I guess.

same with moka and daniel. was struck by illinoise and listened to it quite a bit for a year or so. helped that my gf was/is a much bigger fan than i - if "helped" is the right word. but somewhere around the collection of christmas albums, i suddenly and definitively deplaned. it's not even that they were so terribly bad. they've each got two or three decent songs, and i can endure hearing them come the holidays. (god, i hope i can. last year was tough...) anyway, they're better than what's come since. and i just don't care anymore. everything he does either annoys or bores me. and i can imagine a time when i might voluntarily revisit illinoise, or catch up on what he's been doing, but that time is pretty clearly "not now."

so um

i am kinda shocked at how good this is

mainly because before hearing it

i'm not excited to hear this. i'm not sure why. i liked michigan and illinoise, and it's been a long time since he's released a new full-length, so i'm fairly sure i'm not fatigued by his style.

― Daniel, Esq.

Same thing here which I find very strange. Five years ago I thought he was great, now I very rarely listen to his stuff and I'm not excited at all to hear anything about him. The honeymoon's over I guess.

― Moka, Thursday, September 30, 2010 6:11 AM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark

i was totally in this camp

It sorta sounds like if you took the Heartland Van Dyke Parks guy who made Illinois and dropped him into Fritz Lang's Metropolis and then you get the FIVE YEARS LATER.... tag and this is the music he's making now. It's got a lot of the same qualities, but this new kinda futurist darkness. I mean I get that glitch laptop shit is a tired way to code FUTURIST DARKNESS, but when he's making beats that sound like factories and the title & album art refer to a sci-fi outsider artist and it looks like this

http://asthmatickitty.com/images/releases/covers/AKR077_AoA_350.jpg
it's like cmon son
http://zomopro.com/images/metropolis.jpg

Still overblown and what have you, and like always I guess you have to make the decision whether you're willing to indulge it for the sake of subsuming yourself into the dude's big vision.

Don't have the lyrics book in front of me, so no idea if what he's doing here has any kind of resonance in that department.

so like--how much of it is programmed vs. live instruments?

HOOS, yr making a new Sufjan Stevens record something actually semi-appealing to look into

my wife grabbed this from amazon, so i'll be listening to it. i dig sufjan ok, tho he can be annoying.

haven't dl it yet, plan on tonight. from what i've sampled, i dont think i'll like.

i was totally in this camp

yeah. i heard a song from it, and was intrigued. it's . . . different, and i'm willing to give it a go.

so like--how much of it is programmed vs. live instruments?

― call all destroyer, Thursday, October 14, 2010 7:09 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

it's hard to really quantify it because in so many places the strings bleed into the synths and the drums morph into beats and vice versa

so it's just like a big mess? (nb no evaluation is taking place in that statement)

the first track is totally a fake out btw, it sounds like a less tinny HD version of something off Illinois, and then the very next track starts with these freaky underwater mine squelches and it almost sounds like an el-p track

then he starts singing and just by the fact that it's fucking sufjan stevens singing it kinda immediately becomes postal service pastiche a little bit

and yes, it is definitely a big mess xp

i was listening to it last night and noticed i was already 8 of 11 tracks into it and was like wow this is kinda flying by, such brevity is new and weird

then i noticed the last track was the length of an episode of 30 rock

but like at the 6 minute mark "too much" descends (ascends?) into this merrie melodies autechre remix chaos

it's like nothing i've ever heard him do, totally fuckin nuts

title track sounds like new york city throwing a parade for the iron giant

concludes with choir battling it out with beats to cacophony before the rug comes out and we have old school straight up folk guitar and whispered melody, which is kind of breathtaking

i think, for me, i have to get over sufjan stevens-fatigue. i mean, he hasn't put out new product for some time, but when i heard this disc was being released, i thought "ugghhhhh."

unfair, but there it is. in retrospect, i think my interest would have been more piqued if this had been another installment in the 50-state project, tbh.

i was promised an album about hialeah.

I like it quite a bit. Saw it live on Tuesday and mist of the beats were really glitchy and intense. The dissonant horn section and his random choreographed dancing were wonderful. The audience seemed to want a lot more Illinois stuff but except for Chicago as a closer and a two song encore it was all 2010 material, including the 25 minute Impossible Soul. A generous performance if there ever was one, sonically, visually and otherwise. (video projections! Sexy lady robot back up dancers!)

this is the only sufjan album that has not immediately drawn me in, but, because of my love for him <3 i plowed through this hump and am finding it a greatly rewarding album.

the time i saw him last year, the chick doing backing vocals just stood there listlessly like some droopy bitch in makeup, largely doing nothing, occasionally singing something or poking at a keyboard. iunno if it's the same chick doing backing vocals but whenever they come up i think of her and get a bit upset.

I'm currently plowing through this. I've only gotten to track 3 so far. Going on first listen, I'm not blown away so far (tbh, never been a big S.Stevens fan). But I want to like him, so I continue to listen.

'droopy bitch' is my favourite look for bg vocalists

Onto track 5.
too flowery so far

wld pay to see sexy lady robot dancers

still in development stages

okay, so i heard most of this in a record store today. and it's good. like really, really good. took me back to hearing illinoise for the first time. i mean, i was all ready to look the other way and feign disinterest, but what i heard was beautiful and really fucking weird. "dark," like everybody says (or "depressing," like the record store guy said, comparing it late elliott smith), and absolutely wall to wall with bizarre noises, but by no means a mess. it's challenging, but cohesive. like it made me glad he's not keeping on with some boxed-in, states-related formal exercise. this is an ambitious, personal, messed-up and beautiful sounding record. i want to buy it for my GF, but am waiting for the vinyl. and bummed that his local show sold out before i even heard of it.

[/indie]

Seeing this last week, my first thought was that it wouldn't have sold out had people heard the album first and known he was doing this multi-media exploration of schizophrenia and the dark subconscious. Crowd was patient, but clearly being patient, you know?

somebody please steal this guy's synthesizer

Final Review:

Flowery texture + space textures + bright spring orchestrations & IDM space blips and bloops including deep bass beats. I can't handle so many jingly techno flourishes. In place of melodies is more flowery space textures over a beat. And of course there is sufjan singing with backup singers occasionally chiming in for "aaa-aaa-aaahs" and stuff that sounds like children singing

best tracks:
"Age of Adz" is too long and repetitive but I enjoy the vocal arrangement
"I Walked" is the clear highlight of the album. I like this song

I didn't consider the lyrics.. I usually don't unless something apalling jumps at me

pretty poopy

i wonder why this record didnt take off like illinois did -- in 2005, that record was massive

it was actually one of the first really hyped indie records i was aware of, i think. i remember driving around listening to stuff like "decatur" the summer before i went to college

you spent extra time in your car to listen to sufjan stevens?

crying for freedom

*goes to chicago*

"Age of Ads" was stuck in my head in a horrible way the last two days. I think I'm getting over it though

you spent extra time in your car to listen to sufjan stevens?

― Daniel, Esq., Sunday, October 31, 2010 9:18 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

in 2005 i would have done this pretty gladly tbh

show a few nights ago (so, this tour) was the most succesfull realization of dude going above n beyond ott yet imo

This is pretty wacky! I think I really like this.

Fallon

so are they going to have shitty dance moves for every song?

I was at one of the shows in NYC, and there was a lot of amateur dance moves, including a section of "Impossible Soul" that my friend described as 'pussy-popping'
Watching it on Fallon is a different experience from seeing it live, where it contributes to the homemade, outsider aesthetic... which in turn comes off as manic and interesting.
The show made me wonder about 'DIY in the face of commercial success', that to cling the amateur aesthetic while having embraced dual-screen-computer-generated-visuals, co-ordinated light shows, a 13-piece band, sets, large rooms, etc.
It contributed the feeling in my mind that this set of songs is a sort of 'music as therapy'; there's a runaway generosity to it that comes off as kind of nuts.
Like Kevin Blechdom's "Eat My Heart Out" which to me is the double-X twin of "Adz"
Anyway most of this record is the best thing I've heard this year and I've already listened to it more than any of his previous releases.

Sufjan Stevens's latest single is all haywire electronics and scattershot beats – and here's a suitably intense video to match

I hear the "dark" and "depressing" in this, but I don't hear the engaging bits that a lot of you are hearing. This just sort of meanders on without leaving much on an impression. I do get into portions of the jittery beats and synth work, but then it gets ruined by a sung melody being run into the ground through repetition.

kinda admire the batshit elements of this record, but haven't actually been able to make it through the whole thing yet. want to keep at it, though -- some of it is definitely interesting. my prediction is that sometime next year suf releases another, more listener-friendly album.

Xp

That is a good point that I forgot to make (rather I implied it when I said I had the title track engraved into my head for several days causing me headaches. I'm afraid to listen to that song again even though I admitted that it's the 2nd best song on the album)

Every time I go to play this I end up just listening to "Impossible Soul" and moving on to something else.

Yeah, the last two tracks are pretty much the only ones I really want to spend more time with.

Really? I think the last track is the worst thing on there. It sounds like a big joke - like a parody of the whole album that came before it.

maybe that why i like it.

This is actually holding up quite well. I suspect this is a record that will seem more interesting in 5 or 10 years, it feels like it's intended to be his masterpiece (and in some ways, it is), but it also feels like Sufjan is just running away from the sound that the indie critics loved so much, as the best case scenario of not doing so is to come out with Illinois 2 and have everyone say, "well he's not really progressing musically, but I'll take it"

Not saying this record is a total success but I really wish more people had taken it seriously

Listening to it for the first time since shortly after it came out. I really like the first four or five tracks but I think it fizzles after that. Last track is ambitious but takes too many turns for me to find it enjoyable.

this album is actually rad

actually

I love this album. Impossible Soul is probably my favorite Sufjan Song.

I've been really obsessed with this album lately, it's definitely his best.

Impossible soul is the top played song in my library according to iTunes… At least in the last few years since I last lost my library to a format