Sufjan Stevens – The Ascension: There’s too much music on that!

Artist: Sufjan Stevens
Album: The Ascension
Year: 2020
Grade: B

In Brief: The Ascension largely trades in Sufjan’s highly detailed style of storytelling for much broader themes, but it’s still a meticulously crafted and incredibly vulnerable record that once again pulls off an unexpected genre shift from his past work, this time to a glitchy electropop sound that is quite distinct from his past electronic projects. The problem – as with most Sufjan records – is that it’s way too damn long, and the repetition/rumination gets overbearing, to the point where listener fatigue detracts from the quality of tracks that might otherwise stand out as thought-provoking highlights.

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Alrighty folks, it’s time for the big one. By Spotify’s standards, anyway. You see Spotify does this thing every year where it tells me what artists, songs, genres, etc. I’ve listened to the most, and this year, Sufjan Stevens was the winner. That doesn’t mean Mr. Stevens made my favorite album of the year (though he’s won that honor twice in the past, and revisiting those classic records from the 2000s this year certainly helped his overall stream count); it just means he’s the artist I streamed the most songs from this year. The math isn’t that hard to do, considering he put out two albums this year, and since a typical record from Sufjan ranges in length from “Hey, I think maybe he could have edited this down a bit” to “Oh Holy GOD are you kidding me?”, streaming each of these just a few times and being rather perplexed by them both meant that he dominated over artists whose albums were shorter and better, with only a few listens being required before I decided to just buy the thing and listen to my own copy from that point forward. (What Spotify doesn’t know won’t hurt it.) The first of those two records was Aporia, ostensibly a “new age” record of mostly ambient instrumental tracks released back in March that Sufjan made with his stepfather, Lowell Brams, also the curator of Asthmatic Kitty Records, Sufjan’s long-time label. The fact that it got made was admirable, as it was a labor of love on Brams’ part, and Stevens gave him the push he needed to finally get it done as well as the name recognition to get it more widely recognized. I liked the idea of it, I guess… but I gotta be honest, there wasn’t a single experiment among its whopping 21 tracks that really stuck with me. A lot of Sufjan’s collaborative side projects between the “real”, singer/songwriter-oriented records he puts out on his own tend to be head-scratchers, and despite being a massive fan of Sufjan once upon a time, for the most part I’ve stopped following all of his weird rabbit trails. But The Ascension, released in September of this year, seemed like the return of Sufjan as a headlining artist that we had all been waiting for since 2015’s intimate and harrowingly confessional Carrie & Lowell. I went into this thing knowing that regardless of whether I loved or hated it, it was gonna be a big deal.

When a new Sufjan record drops, the first three questions on a lot of listener’s minds are probably going to be: (a) “What stylistic hat is he trying on this time?”, (b) “How insufferably long is this thing gonna be?”, and (c) “How much of it is going to be unlistenable noise?” Admittedly I’m playing up the most obnoxious of Sufjan’s traits for laughs here when in reality, those last two complaints haven’t been so dominant as to make any of his records unenjoyable on a macro scale (OK, not the ones with actual songs on them, at least). The changing styles thing is pretty reliable, though – even in his heyday when he was making critically acclaimed baroque pop records about Midwestern states that were stuffed full of woodwinds and banjos and drum marches in bizarre time signatures, he somehow found the time to make a dissonant electronic record about the Chinese zodiac and an orchestral ode to a New York freeway. Ten years ago when it debuted, The Age of Adz was probably his most shocking turning point, as he abandoned the folksy chamber music almost completely for a weird electronic approximation of it – the off-kilter time signatures and side journeys into dissonant noise were still there, as were the horns and woodwinds in many places, but it all felt like a big Frankenstein’s monster of a record, up to and including the absolutely bonkers 25-minute closing track “Impossible Soul”. From there he backed off for the much more hushed ad woodsy Carrie & Lowell, as mentioned above, and now he’s back to making electronic music again. This time it’s not as much of a shocker – at this point we all realize anything goes genre-wise on a new Sufjan record, but I’d also say that a lot of the rhythms, song structures, and even some of the lyrical refrains fall into more of an accessible “pop” category. There are still plenty of weird moments where the programmed rhythms go into overdrive, or the synths become more menacing (including a few high-pitched experimental bits that border on sensory abuse, though they’re buried within otherwise reasonable catchy songs), but nearly all of these 15 tracks can be distilled down to a lyric and melody that I think would still be meaningful in some way without all the computerized accoutrements. This would seem downright tame by Sufjan’s standards if it weren’t do dang long – at just over 80 minutes, he’s deliberately exceeded the limitations of a physical CD (which, to be fair, is a near-defunct format at this point anyway).

And hoo boy, does this dude love to make the kinds of first impressions that yank the rug right out from under the listener. Nobody was ready for “Too Much” back in 2010, and if for some strange reason you were, you probably weren’t ready for “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross” in 2015. In 2020, the track we weren’t ready for was “America” – an oddity by all accounts, as it’s the final song on the album and it’s TWELVE AND A HALF DING-DANG MINUTES LONG. Stylistically it wasn’t that unusual – it had kind of a bounce to it as the vintage drum pads and some more staticky percussion sounds lightly bounced along in 6/8 time while Sufjan sang melodramatic, multi-tracked melodies on top, and even the uneasy, accusatory lyrics, demanding “Don’t do to me what you did to America!” over and over made for a pretty great conceptual hook. But that was like, half the song (and I’m being generous), with the other half being a indulgent slow melt into an overly long ambient outro. “Single” my ass. No one just slips this into a radio DJ’s hands, or even onto a specially curated “Here’s what’s hot in indie this week” streaming playlist, without being asked what the hell they think they’re doing. The Ascension gave us a few follow-up singles that were much more easily digestible before finally dropping all 15 tracks on us, but man, what a way to mislead listeners into assuming the worst right out of the gate. Sometimes you need to let people absorb the pièce de résistance of your record in its proper context, y’know?

We’ll get to “America” much later, because boy, do I have my work cut out for me just getting through the other 14 tracks on this gargantuan record, which if taken on their own, would easily feel like a complete album and then some. Nearly all of them are long enough and full of enough ideas that I can’t really say “Oh, this track’s filler, you can easily skip it”, outside of one glaring example. It’s just a matter of how the ideas are executed and how the listener might start to get worn down by one glitchy electropop track after the next that they might be tempted to tune out some of the better ideas late in the record. I’m not a vinyl guy, but if I was, I imagine I’d be listening to this record in four distinct sides of a double vinyl, with three or four songs to each side, and then “America” all by its lonesome on the final side. That may be the most manageable way to break it down, because taken all at once, a lot of these otherwise potent song ideas with their very personal lyrics can start to blur together. Ironically, Sufjan is perhaps the least inscrutable he’s ever been on several of these songs, naming several after pop song clichés and even quoting hit pop songs of yesteryear at times, while trying to mine some sort of unexpected truth from ruminating on those phrases that listeners have come to take for granted. It’s either that, or going off on weird astronomical and astrological tangents – weird that this is the stuff we’ve come to expect from Sufjan, while it’s the more straightforward songwriting that catches us off guard. Sufjan’s odd attention to detail and his deliberate blurring of gender norms in some of his past songs may have led to much speculation about his sexuality over the years, but rather than spending our mental energy on tabloid fodder, this record seems designed to elicit a reaction of “Aw, he just wants to love and be loved like the rest of us.” Which is not to say that I had to be assured Sufjan was singing about a girl instead of a guy in order to be relatable in the past… it’s just that much of The Ascension seems to transcend those concerns and make them seem rather small-minded in the context of the universal language he’s trying to become more fluent in.

At the end of the day, I’d have to say I like this record. That’s no small feat, considering the handful of eyeroll inducing-experiments that just plain don’t know when to quit. But there are enough songs that find something genuinely beautiful in the very same words others might utter thoughtlessly, something worth sticking around for a few extra minutes to admire all of its facets. I wish I could say that was enough to make me love this record instead of merely liking it. There’s a really good 10 or 11-song album hiding in here somewhere. While Sufjan might have made the usual mistake of diluting his brand by belaboring the point, I still hold a deep admiration for his willingness to follow his muse to whatever strange place it may lead him, even after all of these years of not knowing how deep down that infinite well I can manage to follow him. Still, if we’re only gonna get a full-length collection of brand new songs from Sufjan every five years, I’d say this should be more than enough to hold us over until 2025. Unless you’re the kind of diehard Sufjan fan who can devour all ten volumes of Songs for Christmas in one sitting, I’d say take this one slowly, ponder a few tracks at a time, let them really sit with you before moving on, and then you might be in the frame of mind to get the most out of The Ascension. At least, that’s what’s worked for me so far.

INDIVIDUAL TRACKS:

1. Make Me an Offer I Cannot Refuse
It’s funny how some parts of this album have warped my perception of how much is too much, but whatever the reason, I don’t think five minutes is too unreasonable of a length for this opening track. It pulls off a subtle bait-and-switch, luring us in with more of a chill, skittering rhythm before unleashing the big guns – an avalanche of booming percussion and siren-like synths comes pouring down on us in the song’s most intense moments. Sufjan’s voice, as it usually does, may seem meek and unassuming, but he’s actually making some rather audacious demands here, opening the record with an ultimatum to God Almighty to either make some sense of all the chaos and disarray around him, or strike him down for asking. It’s bold stuff, slightly marred by an annoying, repetitive “Beep-beep!” noise that rings out for most of the last minute or so, completely out of rhythm with the rest of the song. Did someone leave a car door open? It’s super distracting.
Grade: B

2. Run Away with Me
This is a track that I think is a great example of Sufjan doing something simple but effective. It’s a pretty mellow pop ballad with down-tempo drum programming and calming, glowy keyboards that glisten like stars in a clear sky. The melody is repetitive but incredibly compelling, the kind of thing that invites the listener to softly hum along as he invites a lover to elope with him under cover of night. His reasons for wanting to do this are vague – he hints at others not understanding them and acting aggressively toward them in the first verse, while promising with psuedo-religious language that life will be like a sanctuary if it’s just the two of them in the second: “And I will bring you life/A new communion/With a paradise that brings the truth of light within/And I will show you rapture/A new horizon/Follow me to life and love within.” But presumably, lovers don’t run away together if they’re perfectly safe having a relationship out in the open where they are. The subtext hints at a lot more than the song outwardly says, but since it’s the kind of thing that sounds like it’s whispering a beautiful secret, I’m perfectly OK with that.
Grade: A

3. Video Game
Now this might be the damn finest pop song Sufjan has ever written. It depends on your definition of “pop”, of course, as there are truckloads of catchy songs on Michigan and Illinois with exuberant vocals, indelible melodies, and ingenious instrumental hooks. I’m comfortable referring to the maximalist tracks firm those albums as “baroque pop”. But those usually bent conventional song structure in some way that ensured they’d never make it anywhere near a Top 40 station. This track simply marries a snappy electronic beat, another easily singable melody, excellent layer of Sufjan’s lead and backing vocals, and an intriguing lyrical hook to deliver a strong single that, if you’re slick about it, you probably could slip into a modern pop playlist and turn some heads as a result. While on the surface, the musical backdrop sounds absolutely perfect for a song about video games, there’s quite a bit of depth to it if you pay attention to the lyrics, and especially if you know about all the labels Sufjan has worn, sometimes uncomfortably, over his twenty-some years as a professional musician: “I don’t wanna be your personal Jesus/I don’t wanna live inside of that flame/In a way I wanna be my own believer/I don’t wanna play your video game.” I think there are a lot of us who discovered Sufjan at a time when, even if he was making something far from conventional Christian music, we still heard religious themes in his songs (especially on the Seven Swans album) and assumed he was aiming those songs at a certain demographic. Perhaps others were hearing gay subtext in certain songs and hoping he’d become something of a poster boy for LGBT representation in folk music or something. Point is, we all had our expectations and he zig-zagged them as he saw fit, and I think he’s most comfortable when his music isn’t easily defined by one group who can call him exclusively “theirs”. He seems to draw a line between artist and performer here, acknowledging that he makes music for a paycheck, but also making it clear how hollowed out it makes him feel when others come expecting a didactic, preachy message on whatever topic they’re all fired up about. Even if you don’t pick up on any of that, or you come up with a completely different interpretation (which is highly likely given the diverse fanbase he’s accumulated over the years), I hope you’ll agree that this is one of his most stunning singles of all time.
Grade: A+

4. Lamentations
I thought at first that this was one of the more experimental tracks. It certainly has its moments where the fast-and-furious rhythm seems to be an end unto itself, almost as if this was an instrumental breakdown that got some words tacked on later. But it’s relatively short by this album’s standards, at just under four minutes, and the two verses and a short bridge that Sufjan provides help to further illuminate the frustration he seemed to be expressing in the opening track. He deeply wants to be with someone who appears to hold the cards in their relationship – that person comes or goes from Sufjan’s presence at will, and their state of careless indecision is doing a real number on his mental health. This could be God, or it could be a lover who was less invested in the relationship than Sufjan was – as with a lot of his songs, you can read it how you’re inclined to read it. Either way, if this is Sufjan’s version of sackcloth and ashes, I have to say I’m weirdly comfortable with it.
Grade: A-

5. Tell Me You Love Me
This one kind of snuck up on me just recently. It’s a bit of a lullaby – sort of in the same vein as “Run Away with Me”, but a little less assured of itself due to the one-sided nature of the relationship Sufjan’s been struggling to hang on to. Appropriate for a song following “Lamentations”, this song finds him singing in close t a defeated whisper, begging for some sort of a sign that it’s worth holding on to the faith he’s rapidly losing. The synths are soft as clouds here – every sound made by the first few minutes this song seems to brush against the listener with the gentle touch of an angel’s wing, and yet Sufjan is pretty clearly in agony. (Interestingly, he’s recontextualizing some of his own material here, as some of the instrumentation is based on “Climb That Mountain” from Aporia.) Just when I think this one’s going to float by, content to be sadly pretty for a few minutes and then fade away, Sufjan hits us with a stunningly beautiful climax that I didn’t see coming. It’s the kind of thing where I genuinely wonder if the power of it would have struck me earlier on if it weren’t buried within a record that mostly uses the same instrumentation and slow to medium tempos from one song to the next – it’s harder for that one gorgeous sleeper out of 15 tracks to stand out the way it might deserve to.
Grade: B+

6. Die Happy
Oh, HELL no. There is NO excuse for this tediousness. Coming on the heels of a somewhat sleepy but surprisingly effective track, we’ve got a downright sleep-inducing instrumental (at least, for the first half or so of its ridiculous near-six-minute runtime) that features no lyrics other than Sufjan repeating “I want to die happy” roughly twenty times. There’s no chance for this dull refrain to build or change – sure, the instrumentation does, exploding into a much more entertaining percussive breakdown midway through, but even then, it’s a rehash of a trick that “Make Me an Offer” already pulled. I’m fine with interludes that give us a chance to pause midway through an album and reflect on a simple, repeating thought – but a minute or two of this would have gotten the point across just fine. Or take out the vocals and make it less obvious how dang repetitive the thing is (though even then, it feels like it really ought to be wrapping up somewhere around the four-minute mark.)
Grade: D

7. Ativan
Ready for a six-and-a-half-minute panic attack? Yeah… no one ever is. (To be fair, it’s really more of a five-minute panic attack with some relatively calm strings in the outro, but that’s just a means of artificially extending a track that was already longer than it needed to be.) Mental and physical health were important subject matter on The Age of Adz, and I can still remember how startling it was to hear “I Want to Be Well” for the first time, not yet realizing the backstory of the debilitating nerve disorder Sufjan had suffered in the interim between making Illinois and that record. This time around he’s trying to give us the aural equivalent of the anxiety attacks he dealt with and had to take medication for – “Ativan” is the name of such a medication, and apparently a side effect is that it kind of zonks you out and makes you sleepy. So the song is part urgent rhythm (there’s some fairly good drum machine work here that approaches drill & bass even if it’s not quite that intense) and part woozy drone, deliberately leaving the listener unsure of whether they’re supposed to get up and dance or drift off to sleep. (Weirdly, there’s a bit of vocal melody in here that reminds me of a much happier-sounding song off of The Avalanche that I can’t recall by name at the moment.) With his faith in such universal things as God and love now but a dim beacon in the distance, Sufjan structures this song like a prayer to the drug he’s taking, as if it were some sort of a goddess that could grant his wish of having his freaked-out nervous feelings tranquilized into oblivion, so long as he pays penance by dealing with the gnarly side effects. And um… yeah, he has a tendency to overshare about those side effects. I could gladly go my whole life without hearing a singer tell me they shit their pants and wet the bed. But the real crime here is how an otherwise effectively claustrophobic song gets diluted by overstaying is welcome, and considering that it comes right after another patience-testing track, the pacing of this record is pretty much shot to hell at this point.
Grade: C+

8. Ursa Major
Faith starts to make a comeback in this mid-tempo song, which features a rather schizophrenic blend between its mid-tempo rhythm and the soft hum of its synths, and the clanging, borderline atonal beats and sampling that feel like something brought in from an old-school hip-hop record. Nothing bad about that, per se… it’s just different. This one is a more sincere that actually addresses God/the Lord directly, so this time around there’s less room for alternate interpretations. He genuinely wants to love God and re-learn how to see the beauty of creation, and he’s trying to deal with the dissonance between that and his current mental state, as well as the suffering he sees going on around him. He seems more determined here – assured that he will come out on the other side of this struggle having re-learned how to love.
Grade: B

9. Landslide
I enjoy the vintage sound of some of the drum pads in this song – they remind me of a time in the 80s or 90s when purely electronic music was still largely an underground thing that you had to be a certain type of a geek to fully appreciate. Unfortunately there’s a repetitive and somewhat high-pitched “shimmering” noise that keeps cropping up again and again – it’s not terribly extreme and some may even find the sound pleasant, but it always seems to hit my ears with more force than it should, and it’s a harbinger of more glaringly high-pitched sounds to come in the next few tracks. Lyrically, this one goes back to the whole “Is he talking to God or someone he wants to sleep with?” conundrum, at times making me think he’s trying to strike a bargain with God (“You get me out of this and I’ll give you access”), and at other times making me think he made the mistake of equating a short fling with a religious experience (“I saw your body and I saw what I liked”). Then there are the lyrics I flat out don’t know what to do with, such as “I saw the same shit, I saw the light.” Weird way to refer to an epiphany, unless you’ve been having the same one over and over to the point where you’re sick of it. Speaking of doing things over and over, the instrumental bridge of this song, between the chorus and third verse, seems rather lengthy – there’s a guitar solo in there that slowly builds up from barely noticeable background ambiance to something actually worth giving the instrument center stage, but I’m still left with the feeling that what this song communicates in five minutes, it probably could have managed to just fine in three.
Grade: B-

10. Gilgamesh
This is definitely one of the album’s stranger compositions. Lyrically, it references the Epic of Gilgamesh – the world’s oldest surviving folk tale – and it delves into the loneliness a man experiences in his quest to become immortal, as he realizes he’s leaving behind everyone he loves in the process. As on much of this record, Sufjan’s voice sounds utterly sincere, even pious in his devotion – even if it’s to an utterly insane idea. That insane devotion honestly applies to the music as well, which really tests both he high and low ends of the listener’s range with its skittering and squelching beat straight out of Björk’s Homogenic era, its unsettling bass drops, and its high metallic “hisses” that I find borderline headache-inducing. (Though weirdly, that last part bothers me less with my cheap headphones on than it does coming through my tinny laptop speakers – maybe with a more robust sound system this sounds better? Or else the extreme frequencies just get more magnified. I’m honestly afraid to find out.)
Grade: C+

11. Death Star
I’m just now realizing that a lot of these tracks use soft, ambient tone poems as short intros before bringing the beat in and completely changing the character of the song – it’s like the reverse of Carrie & Lowell, where a lot of otherwise sparse and folksy songs ended with that sort of ambiance. (And I suppose he’s done this sort of thing even as far back as Michigan, now that I think about it.) Once the booty-shaking beat kicks in, I’m reminded of the fourth and liveliest moment of the 25-minute epic “Impossible Soul”. It’s not a bad thing to be reminded of at all – but this time around it comes paired with a much more chilling set of lyrics. Sufjan is looking outside himself and his personal woes and making more of a political or environmental state with this one, as far as I can tell, bringing the imagery of the Death Star from the classic Star Wars trilogy to mind as he witnesses someone so hell-bent on violating the planet for personal gain that they don’t even care that they’ll end up on the chopping block when humanity ultimately discovers their crime and turns against them. It’s a menacing anthem of resistance, made all the much more perverse by some of the more sing-songy melodic bits. Oh yeah, and those irritating high-pitched sounds kind of bleed over into this one too… but I’m enjoying the rest of this song’s groove enough that I don’t feel like complaining as much this time around.
Grade: B+

12. Goodbye to All That
The rhythm from “Death Star” barrels straight into this song without so much as a pause, dragging some of its background vocal bits along for the ride, which reminds me very much of how the different movements of “Impossible Soul” gradually morphed from one to the next. Melodically, this one is much less dark and eerie than its conjoined twin – it almost sounds like it could have been a slow, choral elegy if not for the decision to superimpose the busy drum track on top of it. Actually, I quite like the effect because of the conflicting emotions it seems to present – on the one hand Sufjan seems steeled with resolve as he prepares to pull up roots and leave a city that he feels has nothing left to offer him, but on the other hand he’s taking a wistful and melancholy look back, wondering what could have been as he eulogizes the life he once had there.
Grade: B

13. Sugar
This is the second-longest track on the album, at seven and a half minutes long… so of course Sufjan had to go and make it a single. To be fair, I could actually see this one working just fine in more of a compact format if edited down to a few verses and the chorus – there’s a good three minutes of slow build up until Sufjan even sings the first word! You’d expect me to hate this as much as I hated “Die Happy”, especially considering how repetitive the cheesy refrain of “Come on, baby, give me some sugar” gets, occurring in both the verses and the chorus. The thing is, this one actually remembers to supply some lyrics that help to illuminate the phrase and give it context beyond the ridiculous cliché that it is – when Sufjan sings of eating poison or lying in wait, starving, not knowing when his next meal will be, his need for “sugar” starts to seem a lot more dire than the light-hearted innuendo we might have taken it to be at first. What surprises me the most here is how the groove remains fairly mellow throughout the song, yet it has plenty of room to grow and change as different samples, ghostly bits of backing vocals, and quavering electric guitar chords float in and out of the mix, many of them recurring in a way that triggers the pattern recognition center of my brain rather satisfyingly. You hear the pieces all slowly comin together and you know roughly when to anticipate that most of them will repeat, yet it’s never solely about the repetition, as there seems to be a subtle new element to focus on every four to eight bars. It’s hard to explain why I love this one so much, since if you had explained the idea of it to me before I actually got to hear it for myself, I probably would have expected to react very negatively to it.
Grade: A-

14. The Ascension
The title track is easily the least gimmicky thing on the album – it’s still electronic in the sense that it’s played entirely on a keyboard, but the drum pads take a rest, and whatever ambient layers are there floating in the background are pretty subtle. This is a spotlight moment for Sufjan’s voice, a plaintive but lovely melody, and a simple chord progression that sets Sufjan up quite nicely for the confessional, vulnerable high notes. He really sounds like he’s achieved some sort of peace here, even if it doesn’t give him all the answers or a clear idea of what to do next. He’s finally unmoored himself from the dependency he had on others to make him happy, to fill the bottomless pit that was his need for love when he hadn’t yet figured out how to love himself. (Side note: The “Love Yourself” single from last summer and its B-side “With All My Heart” would have fit in quite nicely here, and in hindsight they almost feel like a deliberate prelude to this album.) On first listen, I had taken “The Ascension” more literally, as I thought it referred to the transition from life to death, and finally seeing things the way they were meant to be from the great beyond. But now I realize this is very much an epiphany one experiences while still alive, and I love how self-aware and descriptive Sufjan is as he tries to capture that momentary feeling of self-empowerment. What’s crazy to me now is that I never stopped to think about the fact that this track is six minutes long. I’ve criticized a lot of tracks on this album for sticking around too long and giving the listener diminishing returns, but someone this one never once felt to me like it was overstaying its welcome. Sure, you could say that the last note of it rings out somewhere around 5:15, but that last 45 seconds of soft, meditative tones feels appropriate to me – like the thought that this album should have ended on.
Grade: B+

15. America
So here’s the aforementioned pièce de résistance – the twelve-and-a-half-minute behemoth looming at the end of the album, the surprise that got spoiled way ahead of time because Sufjan apparently felt it was that important for us all to hear it. The title alone tells you that it’s going to have a political bent to it – though with Sufjan, it’s never that straightforward. Even though its pointed accusation, “Don’t do to me what you did to America!” sounds perfect for the utter turmoil our country has faced throughout the year 2020, it’s worth noting that this song was being worked on as far back as 2014, well before most of us had any concept of just how screwed up things were going to get in the latter half of that decade. It’s interesting how tightly the Christian themes and the political ones are interwoven in this song – once again he mentions a loss of faith, and I’m not quite sure who the culprit is that he wants to protect himself from after seeing what they’ve done to America, but evangelical Christianity seems like a pretty good guess. Sufjan spent much of his early career painting vividly detailed pictures of life in rural Midwestern America, often weaving references to his faith into the homespun lyrics, even if he often wasn’t candy-coating the hardships some of those small-town denizens had to go through. While even back then I don’t think Sufjan was comfortable being seen as a poster boy for a worldview he didn’t line up with in many ways, this would seem to be the point where he doesn’t want to be so rigidly defined, as an American or as a Christian, due to the toxic relationship between the two that has blurred the lines and become a form of idolatry for so many. This song has some pretty fascinating implications if I’m reading it correctly (which is never a guarantee with this guy), and for the first six or seven minutes, I’m intrigued by its slow burn. It’s perhaps the only song on the record to break out of 4/4 time, due to the syncopation that shifts it to 6/8, with the emphasis changing in the song’s climax so that it feels twice as fast as the rest of the song even though the tempo hasn’t actually changed. The various samples and programmed bits that are treated with blurry, heavy reverb at various points in the song (I could swear there’s a Uilleann pipe in there somewhere) give it the disorienting feeling of standing in a dark tunnel while cars whiz past you at terrifying speeds. it’s not a particularly fast or frenetic song, but it’s a troubled one, and all of those background effects do an excellent job of keeping the listener on edge. This is great up until somewhere just past the seven-minute mark, when the song seems to be fizzling out and coming to a close. Perhaps it’s belabored the point a bit on the way there, but that’s nothing compared to the final five minutes of the song, which are an ugly and seemingly interminable series of droning and groaning synth notes, finally resolving to a more peaceful ambiance in the last minute or so. It’s the album’s most egregious example of a song just plain not knowing when to quit, and it’s magnified intensely by being at the end of an album where the listener’s patience has likely already worn thin at several points along the way. It drags down my opinion of the song quite a bit, despite how strongly I identify with the apparent message of it. I’m also bothered by the question of whether this song even belongs on the album in the first place. So much of The Ascension has centered on a personal quest to feel genuinely loved and have lasting faith in something that matters. I suppose one could argue that Sufjan’s loss of faith in his country and the ability of humankind to do the right thing when the chips are down makes this song relevant, but it’s such an obviously political statement that it feels like a radical shift in tone coming after the personal solace found in the title track. I feel like this one made the cut for the album only because it had been hanging around for so long that Sufjan wanted to be sure it got noticed, and releasing it as a standalone single might have generated less discussion about it beyond the first few days it was available on streaming platforms. Still, this seems very much like it wants to be its own isolated thing, with a defined beginning, middle, and end, and tacking it onto an album in this matter gives it the side effect of feeling like a bonus or hidden track. It probably sounds hypocritical for me to suggest that the album didn’t really need this track, and the track didn’t really need the album considering how much annoyance I’ve expressed in recent years over great stand-alone singles that I was hoping would make it onto an album and never did. In those cases it’s usually because the resulting album feels short on content and/or not so thematically distinctive that the song would have felt out of place, and I can usually envision the album flowing better with the song I already know and love spliced back into the track listing. That’s definitely not the case here – for better or worse – “America” is such a beguiling attention-grabber that it’s pretty much guaranteed to throw any playlist it’s a part of completely out of balance. For best results, listen to this one on its own and then take a break (and do the same with the rest of the album, taking an intermission wherever you need to and then definitely stopping it after “The Ascension” – it’s just easier to digest that way).
Grade: C+

WHAT’S IT WORTH TO ME?
Make Me an Offer I Cannot Refuse $1
Run Away with Me $1.75
Video Game $2
Lamentations $1.50
Tell Me You Love Me $1.25
Die Happy -$.50
Ativan $.50
Ursa Major $1
Landslide $.75
Gilgamesh $.50
Death Star $1.25
Goodbye to All That $1
Sugar $1.50
The Ascension $1.25
America $.50
TOTAL: $15.25

LISTEN FOR YOURSELF:

MORE USEFUL LINKS:
https://sufjan.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Sufjan-Stevens-73949695413/