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Sufjan Stevens music review
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Sufjan Stevens The Avalanche
Asthmatic Kitty
The Avalanche is not your typical outtakes album. The 76 minutes of left-over material from Sufjan Stevens’ triumphant 2005 Illinois contain no half-finished songs, no in-studio banter and no throw-away tracks. Instead there are 21 polished, fully-realized songs. If it weren’t for the three versions of the original album’s centerpiece, “Chicago”, there would be no sign that The Avalanche wasn’t intended to stand on its own as a follow-up LP.
Track listing:
01 The Avalanche
02 Dear Mr. Supercomputer
03 Adlai Stevenson
04 The Vivian Girls Are Visited In the Night by Saint Dararius and his Squadron of Benevolent Butterflies
05 Chicago (Acoustic Version)
06 The Henney Buggy Band
07 Soul Bellow
08 Carlyle Lake
09 Springfield, or Bobby Got a Shadfly Caught in his Hair
10 The Mistress Witch from McClure (or, The Mind That Knows Itself)
11 Kaskadia River
12 Chicago (adult contemporary easy listening version)
13 Inaugural Pop Music for Jane Margaret Byrne
14 No Man's Land
15 The Palm Sunday Tornado Hits Crystal Lake
16 The Pick-up
17 The Perpetual Self, or "What Would Saul Alinsky Do?"
18 For Clyde Tombaugh
19 Chicago (Multiple Personality Disorder version)
20 Pittsfield
21 The Undivided Self (for Eppie and Popo)
And it would be a good one at that. That Stevens was left with this much quality material on his hands at the end of completing last year’s best album (and a long one at that) is amazing. Not only would gems like “Adlai Stevenson” and “Pittsfield” have held their own on Illinois, they would have been among its best tracks. In fact, there isn’t a single song on The Avalanche which would have sounded out of place. Each is more of the same lush, intricate, well-researched, Brubeckian-timed and banjo-driven folkpop that has made Sufjan Stevens the hipster’s most popular God-fearing troubadour.
That’s not to say that The Avalanche is as good as Illinois; it’s not. There are times when a song or an instrumental doodling goes on too long, and others that make you wonder what exactly he thinks he’s doing with that electric guitar (he seems to aim for a raw Neil Young but ends up at just plain bad). Add to that the unnecessary inclusion of the three versions “Chicago”, which add little, and the album isn’t quite as good as it might have been had it been taken more seriously.
As something intended as little more that a footnote, however, it’s remarkable. Without the filler, The Avalanche may have been one of this year’s best albums. As it is, it’s one of the finest outtakes compilations since the Beatles Anthology.
