Stevens returns, but changes his sound

For five years we’ve heard mixed messages about Sufjan Stevens. He was done with his 50-states project (not surprising), done with conventional songwriting and obsessed with a part of I-278. Now, he’s resurfaced in a big way, bearing unwieldy gifts. Sufjan Stevens

The Age of Adz

Label: Asthmatic Kitty

Grade: B+

Rocks Like: Baroque music and Electronica’s melodically gifted baby

For five years we’ve heard mixed messages about Sufjan Stevens. He was done with his 50-states project (not surprising), done with conventional songwriting and obsessed with a part of I-278. Now, he’s resurfaced in a big way, bearing unwieldy gifts.

The press kit for The Age of Adz, Stevens’ first LP of new songs since 2005’s Illinois, counsels listeners to expect “no historical panoramas, no civic gestures, no literary maneuvers, no expository illustrations drenched in cultural theory,” and so on. But wait: isn’t all that the essence of Sufjan?

Yes and no. The part of Stevens that conveyed emotion about social issues in Americana-informed song-cycles is gone, but Sufjan the maximalist is alive and well. If anything, the latter displaced the former. And now synthesized beats have re-entered his compositional toolbox, for the first time since 2001’s Enjoy Your Rabbit.

It’s a striking development, sometimes an awkward one. While Stevens’ new arrangements are reaching higher and higher levels of grandiosity, he has taken to singing lines like “I was wiggin’ out,” and, “I think of you [a lover] as my brother, although that sounds dumb.” The words are unguarded and confessional, verging on pure pop straightforwardness, but they’re nearly shouted down by densely layered woodwinds, brass, electro-noises and backing choirs.

Stevens is too meticulous a songwriter for any incongruity between his lyrics and his music to be unintentional. The album’s allusions to Royal Robertson, a paranoid schizophrenic who felt humanity was rapidly approaching destruction, suggest that Stevens wants to place his intensely personal narratives against a backdrop of apocalyptic anxiety.

When musical pyrotechnics are too much in the foreground, the songs are diluted, but when the instrumentation stops challenging Stevens’ singing and starts accentuating it, the results are cathartic. The two standout tracks  — “All for Myself” and “I Want to Be Well” — are bracing efforts at self-revelation that no fan will be entirely prepared for.

Moreover, these songs present a statement of purpose that, while it may not render the album’s excesses more listenable, does assimilate them into a conceptual whole, press-kit-be-damned. Across all its shifts in direction, The Age of Adz is a search for composure in the face of personal and global doomsdays  — a search more gratifying than tiresome.