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Album Details

• Artist: Sufjan Stevens
• Album: Age Of Adz
• Label: Asthmatic Kitty
• Year of Release: 2010
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: tosnob on 2011-03-18

It must be difficult to be Sufjan Stevens. I can't imagine the incredible pressure he must feel each and every morning, knowing that he's expected to be even more pretentious than he was the day before. Well, he may have trumped himself with his forthcoming album The Age of Adz (out October 12th).

The title itself is pretentious enough...but then the music starts.

The songs, leaning more to the computer processed side this time out, are confused and unfocused. "I Walked" is a meandering 8-minutes of your life you won't get back. "Now That I'm Older" is designed to be spacey, but is in reality a mess. The title track is so melodramatic it becomes cartoonish rather than cutting edge. Stevens even busts out the Autotune on the unforgivable 25-minute "Impossible Soul".

That's without mentioning songs, like "All for Myself", that are just plain boring.

The most infuriating part is that there are some solid songs buried in the quagmire. For example, "Vesuvius" is complex and infectious, but that gets masked by Stevens' incessant computer wanking. An insidious electro-ooze permeates "Too Much", killing what would otherwise be a glorious song. The only tracks that come away unscathed are the delicate, vibrant opener "Futile Devices" and the frenzied musical storm "Get Real Get Right".

Time after time, Stevens ruins his own songwriting by layering on arrangements that make it sound like Pro Tools vomitted all over the production console. It's difficult to draw any conclusion beyond The Age of Adz being the sound of an artists willfully and deliberately setting out to vandalize his own work to expose his fan base as a mass of hipster drones who will mindlessly worship him, regardless of the aural abomination he presents them. If that's the case, maybe Sufjan Stevens truly is a genius.

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