I know this album has been reviwed here before but I've been incipacitated for awhile and to be honest I kinda want a shot at that 'ipod. So this is a review I wrote some time back for someone else. So there.
So apparently, unbeknown to me, the sprit of Randy Newman has been reincarnated into the body of a 30 years old singer/songwriter/banjo player from New York. Go with me on this.
Illinois is the second installment of Detroit born Sufjan Steven’s planed 50 album cycle of LP’s about the fifty states. Why? Because he can. Released on Steven’s own Asthmatic Kitty records, free of those major label concerns like “Who the hell will buy this?”, Stevens is free to engage in anything he bloody well please and he does.
The album is supposed the represent the history, culture and character of the land of Lincoln and Stevens does that (for the most part) gloriously, although not without the occasional head scratch. The album covers a vast wash of ground and it makes full use of its 22 tracks and almost 78 minutes. It takes the listener on a journey consisting of UFO’s, the 1903 World’s Fair, Stephen A. Douglas, Carl Sandburg and the Cubs. What, no love for “Dah Bears?”
It’s a bumpy ride to be sure. The album includes some carry over of the Christian themes covered in Steven’s previous opus “Seven Swans” and adds in some hippie campfire sing alongs and Schoolhouse Rocks just for kicks. It opens with a piano and string laced song called Concerning The UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois, which does just that. An instrumental (the first of many) follows that uses crashing drums and strings to simulate the downfall of the Sauk Indian tribe. It than picks up into a two part song cycle that is somehow connected to the rest. I just haven’t figured out how yet.
Decatur Or A Round Of Applause For Your Stepmom is a simple little song that contains the absolutely brilliant line “Stephen A. Douglas was the great debater/but Abraham Lincoln was the great emancipator.” The album two best songs though are Casimir Pulaski Day (an actual holiday in the land of my birth) about a young boy who’s best friend dies of cancer. Stevens has a voice very reminiscint of Nick Drake, able to conjure up images of great sadness without every stooping to melodrama or mopiness. The Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out To Get Us builds upon elaborate orchestrations that sound Steve Reich’s Music For 16 Musicians being hijacked by Brian Eno circa Another Green World. The song even includes a full chorus just in case you were feeling at all deprived sonically.
To be certain there are missteps, as you’d expect from album of this scope. The numerous instrumentals that dot the second half of the album tend to way it down and I don’t know why there’s a song on here about famed serial killer John Wayne Gacy Junior but Stevens is a songwriter who is in his element when pushing things to the edge. It takes many listens to the album to even begin to digest all of it. Once you do though, you will find an album that through its scope and sheer ambition reaches a transcendent plateau of grace and beauty. Personally….I’m dying in anticipation of Rhode Island.
