Album of the Week | Sufjan Stevens: Javelin

Sufjan Stevens simply does not stop. The man is always doing something, whether it be making a concept record about a planetary system, writing songs for movies, adapting his album to a stage production or making countless instrumental epics. Rarely does he treat us with a proper studio record in the vein of something like 2004’s Seven Swans or 2005’s Illinois. But, just three years after his last record—the sprawling and opulent The Ascension—he’s back. Billed as a spiritual successor to Carrie & Lowell but with a focus on ’70s LA studio wizardry, Javelin sees the Detroit-born songwriter return with a piano and acoustic guitar in tow.

Although the album’s promotional cycle would have you believe Javelin is a straightforward extension of the gentle melancholy of Carrie & Lowell, that’s a slight misnomer. Rather, Stevens’ latest blends the synth-driven freakouts of 2010’s The Age of Adz with his quieter endeavors. Take the opening track “Goodbye Evergreen,” which makes the album’s thesis clear from the outset. Soft piano chords accompany Stevens’ diaphanous vocals, and he’s soon joined by background singers Megan Lui and Hannah Cohen—who harmonize with him to craft a rich, sumptuous arrangement. Whereas these first few moments are the sonic equivalent of a gilded Victorian mirror, Stevens shatters that mirror just a minute into the song; industrial clanks and clinks usher in a blast of unexpected pandemonium. Imagine The Age of Adz chapters “Futile Devices” and “Too Much” cut apart and pasted back together.

This amalgamation of filigreed string instruments and hammering electronics continues on “Everything That Rises,” which could be a Seven Swans track replete with its calls to Jesus, save for the mechanized percussion that drives Stevens forward. On a traditional singer/songwriter album from the indie-rock savant, drums are absent—letting Stevens dictate his own tempo and pacing. Here, there’s an air of urgency pushing him to his resolutions, like the exit music that swells when an award-winner starts taking up too much airtime. Javelin’s insistent percussion enters about halfway into a song, slowly rising in volume, forcing Stevens to raise his voice to cut through the clatter of his own creation.

The eight-and-a-half-minute penultimate epic “Shit Talk” repurposes his longtime obsession with 5/4 for an odyssean journey; it snowballs from finger-picked guitars, courtesy of The National’s Bryce Dessner, to an accelerated pulse, and—when it reaches a fever pitch—he repeatedly asserts that “I don’t wanna fight at all” before his words dissolve into atmospheric horns and gauzy background vocals. It’s a compelling push-and-pull exercise that makes Stevens’ explorations of sacrifice and self-flagellation hit that much harder, as if he’s on his deathbed, issuing his last words to convey a dire message before his heartbeat flatlines. This all makes “Shit Talk” one of the finest songs of his near-30-year career.

Still, there are plenty of instances where he’s able to get himself across without electronic inundation. In some cases, additional layers lift Stevens up, like the glockenspiel and cooing background harmonies on “My Red Little Fox,” or the gossamer keys and billowing strings on the pseudo title track, “Javelin (To Have And To Hold).” He often saves his most harrowing lyrics for songs like these, where his meaning will get through clearest. The lead single “So You Are Tired” renders romantic dissolution in the most direct terms imaginable: “So you are tired of us / So rest your head / Turning back fourteen years / Of what I did and said.” “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” reflects on penance to the extremest degree, burning Stevens in effigy as onlookers “celebrate the afterglow.” It’s among the most devastating laments in Stevens’ oeuvre, which is quite a feat given the profuse sadness that permeates Carrie & Lowell.

Most of Javelin concerns itself with past wrongdoings and the physical atonement, much of it self-induced, that its narrator undergoes as a result. “Give myself as a sacrifice / Genuflecting ghost as I kiss the floor,” Stevens’ opening couplet of “Genuflecting Ghost” goes, making immolation sound peaceful with arpeggiated acoustic guitars. Later in the song, he’s begging someone to “bind” and “insult” him as he “praise[s] your name.” This contrast of disturbing imagery and gorgeous, musical tapestries has long been one of Stevens’ strengths as a songwriter. The way he illustrates hopelessness is so affecting that, despite his quiet voice and instrumentation, his music refuses to recede into the background. It commands your attention in every conceivable way.

Javelin is rife with sadness and despair, but it’s a shame that his work all too frequently gets auto-pegged as “sad-boy” playlist fodder. It’s a facile interpretation of an artist so fluently capable of conveying the wide spectrum of human emotion, such as the exclamatory ebullience of Illinois and the meditative comforts of Seven Swans. Throughout Javelin, Stevens drowns in misery but, at the end, he rises from the surface to find hope. He ends the record with a beautiful rendition of Neil Young’s “There’s a World,” where Stevens realizes there “could be good things in the air for me and you.” The first-person pronoun is Stevens’ own inclusion, and his subtle edit to the original lyrics is nonetheless striking and powerful. After trudging through the gloom, he finds light on the other side, not just for you but also for himself. Like everything Stevens creates, significance lies in even the smallest details.

Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic in Kansas City. His work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, UPROXX and other publications.