Monday, January 3, 2011

Top 10 Albums of 2010 — #3 Age of Adz by Sufjan Stevens


Age of Adz starts out gently enough, with the tender "Futile Devices," which doesn't sound far off from a Michigan or Illinois track, with its acoustic simplicity and honest lyrics.

From there, the album takes a turn with the electronic orchestrations of "Age of Adz," which might shock those whose exposure to Stevens is limited to the two albums in the now-defunct (probably) fifty-states series. However, for those die-hard fans who know either Stevens' dabbling in electronica with Enjoy Your Rabbit or his extended orchestrated, instrumental soundscape to his film, The BQE, Adz will likely seem a logical progression.

The album is a bit strange, I'll admit it. Like Derek Webb's transition from acoustic to electronic last year, this isn't an album for everyone. But for the fan with an open mind—the one who can forgive Stevens for deviating from the fifty states project and can accept that Adz has more synth than banjo (don't worry, there's still banjo)—the album is not to be missed.

At the least, it must be conceded that the album is ambitious—in many ways a departure from what Stevens has become known for, Adz was a risk. When he performed in Portland this winter, he acknowledged the risk, somewhat sheepishly thanking fans for coming out to the show and patiently listening through a set of almost completely new songs—songs released (on Adz and its preceding EP, All Delighted People) after most of them had purchased their tickets for the show. Even with his apologetic thanks, Stevens likely left few fans feeling shafted. He put his heart and soul into the technicolor, multisensory show, and I'm sure most fans left feeling the way I did—that they had just seen the most bizarre and most excellent show.

On Adz, Stevens does more than just experiment with new sounds. Without the convention and themes he built up around the fifty-states album, he was able to create songs that were less about telling a story and more about expressing an emotion. And Adz is highly emotional. At times angry (with the anger sometimes aimed at another, like on "I Walked," and sometimes at himself, like on "I Want to Be Well"), and at times melancholic, the album seems to be, ultimately, a call (like the art of the tortured Royal Robertson, which influenced Stevens heavily as he wrote) to "Get Real Get Right."

There's a lot more I could say on the subject, but, rather than gush, I'll leave you with the newly released video for "Too Much" and let you decide for yourself:

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