Artist: Sufjan Stevens
Album: The Age of Adz
Released: October 2010
Label: Asthmatic Kitty Records
Genre: Electronic / experimental
Purchase Date: 02 Mar 2011
Format: mp3 files
Source: eMusic
This is one album I bought unheard based solely on the reviews of other critics that I respect. The Age of Adz showed up on the "Best of 2010" lists from just about every other music critic I follow, so I decided to take a chance and see what the fuss was all about.
Stevens' music is deeply introspective and extremely complex. He merges the an acoustic folk structure with strangely experimental electronic effects, which can be both intriguing and jarring (sometimes at the same time). Many songs start out simple and then deconstruct themselves into near-chaos, only to coalesce into something else entirely. The songs on the album are also very different from each other, to the point where I found it difficult to discern the connection between them.
This is difficult music that demands repeated listens, if only to try to tease apart what the artist was trying to accomplish with it. It is also music that I didn't find compelling enough to to want to make that kind of investment. While I found bits and pieces of this album to be intriguing, on the whole I found it to be a bit of a mess, with songs exploding into cacophonous electronic bleeps and bloops with nigh-indecipherable lyrics. This experimentation seems to have worked for a lot of critics, and while I applaud the ambition behind this record, as a piece of music, it mostly left me cold.
Rating: B-
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