Album Review: Sufjan Stevens hits the mark with Javelin
Sufjan Stevens has just released Javelin. (Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty)
- Sufjan Stevens
- Javelin
- ★★★★☆
The last time Sufjan Stevens played Ireland, at DCU’s Helix in the summer of 2015, he was touring the vast and impossibly sad Carrie & Lowell.
That record was a series of meditations on mortality – drawing on the grief he had experienced following the death of his birth mother.
The performance culminated in the simultaneously gorgeous and devastating Fourth Of July. Here Stevens solemnly delivered the chorus, “We’re all gonna die” – less warning than acknowledgement of the inevitable.
It was a show from which you staggered away – moved, bemused and with your sense of the world and your place in it ineffably altered.
Almost a decade on, Stevens has returned to the big themes with his tenth official long-player, Javelin. It’s a treatise on love rather than death. One that arrives in the shadow of recent health struggles.
A few weeks ago, Stevens revealed that he had been diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome. This rare nerve condition has impacted his motor skills (he is positive about making a full recovery).
Fans will wish him the best. In the meantime, they will want to lose themselves in the wonderful and wistful Javelin, a turbo-charged odyssey that finds Stevens at his songwriting zenith.
It is a powerful and impressive collection. Stevens wrote, produced and played almost all the instruments (and released it on his own label), and he brings a laser-beam focus to these gilded folk tunes.
Banjos shudder mournfully on 'A Running Start', where Stevens sings about happiness he seems unable to reach out and touch (“if I imagine myself peaceful on the fire-escape, headfirst, my hands inside my t-shirt as we run away’).
Across the succinct 10-track running time, he follows the same trajectory again and again. Songs build from effervescent origins to big squalling fade-outs.
On 'Genuflecting Ghost', his voice is lifted upwards by a swell of backing singers. A cover of Neil Young’s 'There’s A World' turns gospel-tinged and heaven-sent at the end.
With Carrie & Lowell, Stevens levelled with us regarding life and death. He’s just as unflinching on Javelin – though with the more encouraging message that, while the clock of mortality is ticking always, love, if we believe in it enough, goes on forever.
