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Album Review: Sufjan Stevens The Avalanche

In any creative enterprise, it's a delicate balance between a personally themed style and rote repetition. Too much variance and you risk losing focus and identity; not enough and you risk monotony. The answers you provide to your creative problems must each contribute to a larger pattern without losing their overall coherence. Sufjan Stevens has arrived at all his answers, he's used them to posit a style, and with a headlong determination he's duly spun through the same creative solutions to each compositional dilemma he's posed himself with each successive recording.

2003's Michigan set out a legible agenda with its particular combination of acoustic intrumentation, art-math rhythmic elements, and indie-folk aesthetic, an agenda 2005's Illinois took and expanded upon considerably. Indeed, with the hindsight of Illinois, it becomes impossible not to hear Michigan as a collection of half-hatched ideas not quite fleshed out to completion. Almost spacious sounding by comparison, one can easily imagine an extra supporting piano part here...or an entire bank of horns there. The mid/up tempo tracks feel stuck in a lower gear. Where Illinois zips dizzyingly back and forth with ferocious clarity, Michigan mulls over each step too carefully. These albums, though, unmistakably share the same DNA, separated by a matter of degree, not of kind.

In fact, so much surface similarity exists between the opening of Michigan and Illinois that it required several listenings before they became distinct in my memory. Both albums begin with quiet piano accompanied only by vocals and minor supporting parts, followed by an up-tempo track jumpstarted by a signature piano riff in what can only be referred to as "the sufjan rhythm". They are full of the same instrumentation, the same structural devices, the same moods.

Yet these albums are anything but bogged down in repetition. Instead, layer after layer of instrument and vocal voicings offer wide and simultaneous variations; sameness is diffused through the brute force of numbers. If too often you roll your eyes at yet another trumpet line as feel change, that sufjan fatigue is quickly forgotten as the song adds new lines to distract. Here there's always another line, just around the corner.

What all those layers add up to is an army of possible subjects to focus on, and to remember. The albums with staying power, that do enough to inspire repeated listenings, they all enjoy that initial blissful period where each listening still brings surprise, before you've memorized each song in order; every good album has a "honeymoon". Sufjan Steven's songs are elaborate, byzantine, rife with digressions and curious addendums that may hold to an established form a bit too often, but that nontheless maintain their impact over many listenings. All Sufjan Stevens' albums have long honeymoons.

The Avalanche is no exception to any of this. Flutes are everywhere fluttering, Banjos are everywhere plucking, and late trumpet lines in verse-chorus-verse songs eagerly substitute for genuine part changes. Even though this is an "in-between" collection of B-sides and outtakes, there are superior tracks. Adlai Stevenson is Stevens at his Ren-Fair best, active and concise, with melodies approaching hook status. No Man's Land hops meticuously to and fro across its logically derived lines. And the three different versions of Illinois' dance hit Chicago offer surprisingly satisfying (even preferable) alternatives. As a compilation and not a proper album, there are naturally different standards to apply. Taken at face value, The Avalanche delivers every bit as much as asked.

Still, Stevens now approaches a tipping point. Influential bands arc through three phases: first, they reveal a style; second, they establish that style; third, they maximize that style and are then faced with the crisis of artistic obsolescence. At that point some risk reinventing themselves, never easy, more often yielding dissapointment (Smashing Pumpkins' Adore) than relative sucess (U2's Achtung Baby). Some choose an Al Gore-esque "journey through the desert" retreat followed by sporadic returns (Neil Young). Some just shrug their shoulders and never look back (The Rolling Stones).

With Illinois and The Avalanche, Stevens has sailed through and beyond the "establishment" period and now has one further release to stretch and hone his frantic flutes and math-folk rhythms to their breaking point. Then, as elegant a pop-musical proof as he has offered, his answers may finally have begun to lose their logic.