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Oct 05, 2023 Web Exclusive By Michael James Hall

From the singular artist who brought you one of the best albums this century in Carrie & Lowell, one of the rare perfect songs in “John Wayne Gacy Jr.,” and, perhaps most importantly, the most joyous festive song of our era with “Christmas Unicorn,” comes Javelin. Billed as Sufjan Stevens’ first true “singer/songwriter” album since the aforementioned Carrie & Lowell in 2015, this record is an immersive, delicate creation from an ever-evolving mind.

Created largely in his home studio and populated by a group of friends including The National’s Bryce Dessner, on Javelin Stevens keeps an intimate tone and, in spite of several blooming, Technicolor moments, is a typically intimate album from the Detroit native.

The songs here exist somewhere between the angelic and the poetic, Stevens’ unique sound placing you between a white winter and an auburn autumn. His ongoing lyrical obsessions of loss, religion, and love are placed tenderly, like heirloom crystal, across light rains of piano, tenderly touched guitar strings, and are lifted to the heavens by Gospel-like choirs.

Much of the album seems like a conversation between two sides of Stevens—the hopeful, spiritual romantic of “My Little Red Fox,” which compels “my love, my queen, my broken dreams, come save me, kiss me like the wind” as glockenspiel and strings rise, and the profoundly lost and damaged man of “So You Are Tired,” asking “So you are seething with laughter/Was it really all just a joke?” and understanding that “I was a man still in love with you/But I already knew it was done’ as a melancholic piano drifts alongside.”

“Javelin (To Have and to Hold),” a transient, sour treat where he’s “Searching for the javelin/I had not meant to throw right at you” and later finds “My eyes travelling to the spot/Where you’d thrown yourself over the rocks” is absolutely drenched in grief. Conversely, “A Running Start” has Stevens’ sotto voce swooning with the romance of “I know the time has come to ask you for a kiss/Don’t go my lovely pantomime/receive of me my only wish,” the song eventually, like many here, blossoming into a cavalcade of ethereal voices and eerie percussion.

Consistent throughout is Stevens’ devotional aspect. Songs such as the stripped down beat of “Everything That Rises” (“Jesus lift me to a higher plain”) and “Genuflecting Ghost” (most Sufjan Stevens song title of all time?) with lines like “Rise my love/Show me paradise” and “Can you lift me up to a higher place” are, in essence, hymns. Stevens intermingles the profoundly personal and the religiously profound, sometimes falling into suitable self-flagellation as on “Goodbye Evergreen,” declaring “I’m drowning in my self-defense/Now punish me” and “I grow like a cancer.”

As intricate and wonderfully fragile a record it is, its musical blueprint can border on the repetitive, as can some of Stevens’ lyrical themes. For all its ethereal wonder it does often strike similar notes, and can sometimes feel so gossamer-thin as to be forgettable, in spite of its consistent prettiness. You can’t accuse it of something as awful as being “pleasant” but it does occasionally drift off in that direction.

This slow, sinking feeling is entirely dispersed by the album’s golden, crowning glory, “Shit Talk,” a lengthy, broadly brush-stroked canvas on which Stevens expands his palette and spreads his wings. His vision resonates all the more when this collage finds its bigger picture, Stevens and friends able to hold hands and truly soar. His falsetto never sounded so soulful and there’s a moment here where a single mutant musical note is held by the horns then extends into a luscious waterfall of synthetic strings and wordless, breathless voice. It’s spine-tingling, elating, and moving, and you realize that this was the moment for which you’ve been waiting throughout.

The closer, a radically re-imagined cover of Neil Young’s “There’s a World,” takes the original’s cinematic sweep and massages it into a secret, plaintive whisper, which feels like a comedown, a quiet reaffirmation of what’s come before: “All God’s children/In the wind/Take it in and blow real hard.” Is that cynicism or joy? Or both? Stevens, even when covering another artist, delights in each.

While formulaic at times and inspired at many more, Stevens’ talent positively glows atop Javelin’s transcendent peaks. His most divine work is held as sacred by many, rightly so, and who else could deliver mystically beautiful lines like “The light beneath the frozen lake, a pair of eyes, a gentle breeze, forgotten tales, a wild beast” with such soft luminescence. A somnambulist journey into an ornate dream, Javelin may not be his masterpiece but it is the work of a master. (www.sufjan.com)

Author rating: 8/10