Sufferin’ Stevens, this guy’s got talent

Sufjan Stevens’ complex, nuanced songs are the antithesis of shiny pop culture.
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FOLK

SUFJAN STEVENS, Carrie & Lowell (Asthmatic Kitty/Inertia) ****

Life is complicated. It can be a swirl of unexpected twists, contradictions and problems to solve, doubts, worries and sorrows. If things run smoothly for a while, well, we learn to be grateful.

And be grateful for what art can do to enrich us and to help find meaning as we plough through sweet, mysterious life.

What’s it all for? A painting, a song, a poem, a film or Shakespeare. These are things that help us find out, assure us we are not alone, that everyone, past and present, experiences the same emotions.

Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Mark Kozelek, Bonnie “Prince’’ Billy: they’re philosophers who can help light the way.

As is Sufjan Stevens, whose complex, nuanced songs are the antithesis of shiny pop culture. Life has been as complicated for Stevens as his music can be multi-layered.

His mother, Carrie, left when he was one. After that, contact was fleeting. He was raised by his father and stepmother. When he was five his mother married a man named Lowell who worked in a bookshop in Oregon and Stevens and his siblings spent three summers with them.

Always, there was the wondering about his mother, where is she now, what is she doing? A child cannot understand about schizophrenia, depression and alcoholism. But Stevens saw her before she died of cancer in 2012, told her he loved her. He remains close to Lowell.

Carrie & Lowell by Sufjan Stevens

On Carrie & Lowell, his quietest and most intimate album, the stages of grief, the unanswered questions, the search for meaning, all coalesce. Unlike many of his recording projects, which range from a vast trove of Christmas music to richly detailed albums bouncing off the history of the states of Illinois and Michigan, there is no whimsy or humour here.

The music unravels at a slow, meditative pace, with vocals whispered, chiming acoustic guitars, banjos, shimmering ambient passages and sometimes mystical lyrical lines set against the rawness of reality and mortality. It’s music I imagine made in solitude, late at night, in a room lit by candles.

Sadness is everywhere: the aching Death With Dignity and Should Have Known Better, where it feels as though the singer’s heart is about to burst.

The intimacies of childhood memory are revealed in lines such as “Trace your shadow with my shoe’’ and “When I was three maybe four, she left us at that video store’’.

The 2010 album The Age of Adz was experimental and deeply layered. This is almost its opposite, hushed but with enough subtle touches, such as the electronica that hovers through Should Have Known Better, that it doesn’t sound like just one more troubadour with a guitar. Like those songwriters mentioned, Stevens just sounds like himself.

At the centre of it all is Fourth of July, a message from and to the departed, the listener drawn in by the list of tender pet names for loved ones.

Stevens is not for everyone. Carrie & Lowell is deeply personal, intense and, like life, hard to pin down or explain. But for those who need it, it’s also therapeutic and cathartic.

Noel Mengel

EP

DANIEL JOHNS

Aerial Love (EMI)

***1/2

Never mind the guitars. Johns is having none of that on this debut as a solo artist, 20 years after he was topping the charts with grunge-teens Silverchair. Instead he’s working with Lorde’s co-writer Joel Little and this four-track EP, a taster for an album later this year, works in the same electro-soul sphere as James Blake and Frank Ocean. It’s about as far as he could get from Frogstomp while still remaining in the commercial sphere. The title track balances between old-school and modern, with Johns’s voice cooing in a register up there with Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and Timmy Thomas, although the backing is clean and electronic rather than warm and soulful. On Preach Johns stretches his voice to the limit of his falsetto, backed by a combo of piano and synthesiser that’s hard to resist. I was determined not to like this after Johns’ version of Smells Like Teen Spirit for the Triple J birthday concert. A song as good as Preach soon put a stop to that. Also strong is Late Night Drive, with super-deep bass rumble and clever vocal overlays.

Noel Mengel

FOLK

FRED SMITH

Home (Independent)

****

Smith’s life as a diplomat has taken him to places most songwriters never see and inspired the songs on his 2011 album Dust of Uruzgan. But he was writing and recording for years before his assignment in Afghanistan and, while Home contains two more deeply emotional songs about Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, he turns his eye to other topics here. There’s the tale of a soldier who missed the slaughter of battle in the Civil War, missing the boat after a night in a whorehouse. Others are closer to home, such as Song So Uncertain, about the late Canberra music figure David Branson, who encouraged Smith to write songs and get on a stage. Melbourne musician and producer Shane O’Mara delivers a great sound but it’s Smith’s songs that carry the day, and none better than the two war songs, Going Home and Derapet. The latter tells the story of the month of August 2010, which cost so many lives in Afghanistan culminating in a bloody battle. If Derapet doesn’t rock you to the core, I don’t know what will.

Noel Mengel

CLASSICAL

VOCES8

Lux (Decca)

****

Easter is not the theme for this disc featuring British ensemble VOCES8 under Barnaby Smith’s artistic direction, but its title, Lux (light), is a seasonal hope-filled symbol. Well-balanced and blended, voices form ethereal textures but sometimes not real enough. Although it is a small complaint given the fine vocal combination and that soprano voice soaring in Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere. What fun it must be to toss those high notes into the stratosphere. The singers gauge light and shade skilfully as their sensitive phrasing creates tranquil moods. Ubi Caritas is both apt opener and finale, the first by Ola Gjeilo, the second in Paul Mealor’s setting. Also resonating suitably is Thomas Tallis’ O nata lux, one of three “lux’’ tracks in the program. The same restrained harmonies fill out The Luckiest (Ben Folds) and voices hover in Christian Forshaw’s adaptation with his saxophone descant in French carol Corde natus ex parentis. One drawback: sleeve notes printed white on gold suggest light, but they are hard to read.

Patricia Kelly

ROCK

SCORPIONS

Return to Forever (RCA/Sony)

**

The bluesy riff that opens Scorpions’ 18th studio album gets the hopes up, but from there it’s sadly all downhill. Return to Forever is an oddly appropriate title as it’s the same fare we’ve been hearing for, well, forever. There’s a sense of repetition and regurgitation reflected in lyrics such as “We’re going out with a bang/With a bang bang bang” and “Rock rock rock my car/Let’s put the pedal down to the metal”. And Going Out With a Bang and Rock ’N’ Roll Band are suspiciously similar songs. Lazy lyrics aside, there’s technically nothing wrong with the musicianship here, it’s all perfectly executed power chords and driving rhythms. It’s just that it’s a colour-by-numbers affair that borders on self-parody – the type of music you’d hear in a satirical film by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. It’s possible – nay, probable – that the hardcore Scorpion corps will lap this up. But for the casual hard rock listener there’s not much to recommend this stereotypical set.

John O’Brien

ROOTS

ALLISON MOORER

Down to Believing (eOne)

****

There is a stellar list of albums inspired by breakups, from Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Allison Moorer’s Down to Believing, recorded over two years as she dealt with the end of her marriage to alt-rocker Steve Earle and the autism diagnosis for their young son, holds its own in this company. This long gestation makes for a compelling song cycle of gradual healing and a considerable achievement for the Alabama-born artist better known for her wonderfully sultry voice than her writing. The early tracks find Moorer confused, angry and adrift. On the lacerating Like It Used To Be, the singer admits “I’m just stumbling down this road, where it goes, I ain’t supposed to know’’, while guitarist-producer Kenny Greenberg drives the message home with stinging lead breaks. Droning cellos and drowning metaphors buttress the ominous Thunderstorm/Hurricane before Moorer’s pain reaches a crescendo on the ferocious Tear Me Apart. From there, the album moves into a sequence of songs which show tenderness, resilience and optimism.

David Costello

ROCK

GANG OF FOUR

What Happens Next (Shock)

****

As he edges toward his 60th birthday, Gang of Four guitarist, songwriter and leader Andy Gill refuses to go gentle. Though less urgent than 2011’s Content, the band’s eighth album in a stop-start 36-year career rails against consumerism, apathy and the digital age with equal parts anger and derision. With its ominous cover art recalling the Twin Towers, What Happens Next also addresses the irony of alienation amid the fake community of social media, proving Gill’s world view is as playfully bleak as ever. But musically it sizzles, with a bevy of guest vocalists (including The Kills’ Allison Mosshart and Gail Ann Dorsey, also long-time bassist for David Bowie) joining new lead singer John Sterry on a dozen tracks that in passing recall Tin Machine-era Bowie (Obey the Ghost) and Depeche Mode (First World Citizen). Gill’s production is to the fore (he’s worked with Killing Joke, The Stranglers, Red Hot Chili Peppers and on Michael Hutchence’s posthumous solo album) – drums heavily compressed with zero cymbal bleed – while Gill’s guitar is spiky, fractured and brooding, an extension of his temperament.

Phil Stafford

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