[Rob Instigator]

His charm started to show some cracks on Seven Swans, a quiet respite between states albums whose bare-bone nature had little of the flair of Michigan. Without this flair, Sufjan seemed like a pedestrian Elliott Smith, only without Smith's haunted grace or natural melodicism. It was a bit of a one-dimensional album, so Stevens' return to baroque on Illinois should have been a consolidation of strengths, which for many listeners it is. Many fans and critics find it a sophisticated display of wit and delicate composition, since there is often a tendency to label any album with woodwinds and brass as being sophisticated. But even if Sufjan can play oboe, even if the time signatures in his songs shift, his music doesn't play as sophisticated, because of the school-report nature of his subjects — each song is thoroughly researched, spit-shined, and presented for the class, as if he's reciting all that he learned during his time in the library — and there's not much variety within the music itself. Most songs on Illinois and The Avalanche, this week's outtakes and demos collection assembled from the same sessions, all bear strikingly similar arrangements, all assembled from Stevens' by now familiar trick bag: wispy choruses, tempo changes, whistling woodwinds, cutesy harmonies. It's music that gives the impression of being sophisticated and complex, that never comes close to the sophistication of Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks, Jimmy Webb, or what Illinois most closely resembles, Brian Wilson in his SMiLE guise.

 

 

The orchestrations and compositions on SMiLE are purposeful — on Illinois, they're clever-clever and showy, as the ornamentation of the production is there for its own sake, never there to illuminate or enhance Sufjan's musical or lyrical motifs. Because, apart from the conceit of writing songs about a particular state, there isn't much connection to the sound or feel of the state in question. Stevens never taps into the musical history of a state — never touching Chicago blues or jazz, or Michigan soul or rock. He simply uses the concept of songs about a state as a vehicle to deliver his baroque folk-pop. And since that baroque folk-pop isn't all that distinctive on its own merits — it certainly doesn't have the complexity or range of Sean O'Hagan's or Jim O'Rourke's work, to name two contemporary touchstones — he needed a hook like the states project to make himself stand out from the pack. And there's also a suspicion that without the 50 states project, Stevens just doesn't have that much to say; certainly the monotonous nature of Seven Swans and the cluttered Avalanche suggest as much. But by wrapping himself into this states project — and even if he abandons it, which I suspect he will, he'll never be separated from it — he has unwittingly emphasized the two traits that make his music no longer quite so charming: his pretension and childish preciousness. These are two qualities that seem to contradict each other, but as Illinois and The Avalanche prove, they feed off each other.

 

His pretension — his convoluted song titles, his cloying song about Saul Bellow, his adolescent fascination with John Wayne Gacy, Jr. — all comes across like a precocious high school student in his senior year, where he's smug enough to want to prove that he's smarter than the rest of the school. Appropriately, his lyrics often read like the work of a gifted but sheltered high schooler, and his music sounds like a drama student's idea of a pop opera — and it's all wrapped up on albums with stylized childish artwork, hand-drawn pictures that inadvertently wind up enforcing the impression that Stevens is an overgrown teenager.

Of course, that's all according to my own ears, and there are plenty of people who disagree with me, whether they're other music scribes or trusted friends and colleagues. But, for me, this week's release of The Avalanche only offers further proof that Sufjan Stevens has been wildly overpraised for music that has deliberately limited appeal.