Five years later, Sufjan’s sixth album proper has arrived. Not about a state, or birds, or an expressway. Audaciously, it’s just an album, and a pretty good one at that. There’s nothing here as affecting as John Wayne Gacy or as rousing as Chicago, but this is nonetheless a confident collection of songs demonstrating an undiminished ear for melody. Overblown (but then we wouldn’t expect anything less), excessive ornamentation is nonetheless Age of Adz’s primary defect.
Initial claims that this would be Sufjan’s Kid A are inevitably off the mark. Kid A was an exercise in restraint; Age of Adz is definitely not that. The addition of electronics is largely ornamental rather than structural, and the stand-outs tend to be the sparser tracks. Now That I’m Older is a beautiful choral piece that at times sounds like a vintage Christmas carol, hushed opener Futile Devices is the delicate finger-picking calm before the glitchy storm, and All for Myself is a joy of twee Disneyish flourishes. But the highlight is undoubtedly Vesuvius, building from simple beginnings to erupt in a cacophony of ecstatic earnestness.
And then there’s the frankly ludicrous 25 minute closer Impossible Soul. It’s difficult to appraise a song of this length, but it manages to capture Of Montreal Skeletal Lamping-esque stylistically scatty excess in just one track, ranging from crashing orchestral sections, to whispered folk, to autotuning with the best of them. It is by turns exhilarating and frustrating, and serves as a microcosm of the album as a whole, if microcosms can last 25 minutes. Age of Adz is not a classic, but it’s not a disappointment either. Exemplifying both his strengths and flaws as a songwriter, it may not win over Sufjan’s critics, but it’s nonetheless a lot of fun.
Words: Carl Cullinane
