At home, I often listen to music in the dark, with my eyes closed, so I can become immersed in the sound world to the exclusion of all else. Sufjan Stevens takes the opposite approach in his shows, bombarding the senses into overload with dancing, state of the art lighting, video art from Deborah Johnson, and ever more ludicrous florescent costumes. In a previous life, I was a dedicated opera fan, where the visual medium is also important, and yet I can remember few productions where the set design was so original or so centre stage.
This show was ambitious in scale, Sufjan having the benefit of 10 backing musicians in his band (even extending to two trombone players) and a vast array of technology. This UK tour has received ecstatic reviews in respected national newspapers, and I’ve even found one by an opera critic and Wagner specialist whom I respect greatly. It was only his second even pop concert and he ended up enjoying it greatly. Well, I’ve now been to considerably more than two gigs, and whilst spectacular, this one didn’t engage with me emotionally: the musical magic was missing. It’s almost as if Sufjan was trying too hard to make up for the music's diffidence by engaging the audience in other ways. I wished I’d seen him five years ago at acoustic gig in a small venue.
Sufjan isn’t exactly shy or retiring, and talks at length between songs: he launched into an extended explanation of the life of outsider artist Royal Robertson, which was heartfelt but a little self-indulgent. The show centres on Sufjan: he’s not the collaborative lead singer of a band, instead the backing musicians work for him. He idiosyncratically explained that his parents thought they were star aliens, and raised him as a star child. The space and alien theme was recurrent, along with religion. In fact the ritualistic, processional presentation reminded me a little of the opera Akhnaten by the contemporary American composer Philip Glass, especially in its epic qualities.
Most of the set was devoted to his 2010 album the Age of Adz, culminating in a 25 minute rendition of Impossible Soul. This album represents a huge discontinuity in style from his previous work, moving away from an indie folk style to electronic space pop. It's difficult to describe: sometimes it feels like a pastiche of pop, sometimes a brass band appears, and other times it sounds like avant garde film music. It's a strange combination of kitsch and deeply original, but the overall effect on me, perhaps due to the rhythms, is unsettling. There's might be a distant influence of Kid A or King of Limbs here, but there's more humanity in Radiohead.
Sufjan said that this new material was a tremendous challenge to play, and I wonder if this focus on the technical in both the music and the production came at the expense of emotional engagement. Only in the final encore, Chicago, from the album Illinoise, did I experience the transportational magic of music, and the crowd had tremendous fun, with the release of balloons adding to the atmosphere.
Sufjan interspersed simple acoustic folk songs between numbers from Age of Adz, but in the middle of such an assault on the senses, they risked being swamped.Ultimately, your reaction to this show will have been conditioned by your view of his shift in style: even listening at home, in the dark, I find something disconnected and alienating in Age of Adz, whereas I'm more sympathetic to Michigan from 2003, for example. This material could hardly have been presented better visually,the venue was great, as was the choreography, directed by the sister of two members of The National. Don't let my personal reservations about the musical style discourage you from seeking out this spectacle yourself; I have immense respect for Sufjan.
Further Photographs
Videos
5/10
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