MUSIC REVIEW: “The Age of Adz” brings a more electronic sound than past Sufjan Stevens albums

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Michigan native and Hope College graduate Sufjan Stevens returns with “The Age of Adz,” the first proper full-length follow up to his popular 2005 masterwork “Illinois.”

“The Age of Adz” finds ole Suf’ up to many of his old tricks and plenty of new ones, relying on a more heavily electronic sound than any of his past works, though still maintaining the epic, grandiose orchestral sound that has made him such a beloved figure in the contemporary music scene.

The album comes on the heels of August’s “All Delighted People EP,” an 8-track, hour long EP Stevens released without any promotion or warning whatsoever on his Bandcamp website on August 20th.

The EP acted as a sort of warm-up to “The Age of Adz,” bringing Stevens back into the public conscious and prepping listeners for the intense, sometimes exhausting listening experience that is his most recent album.

The record starts rather unassumingly with the beautiful “Futile Devices,” a gentle, lullaby of a track that brings to mind some of the more gentle songs found on Stevens’s earlier albums; a sort of gateway between Stevens’s more well-known brand of folk and the hectic, electronic nature of the rest of the album.

The album’s title track demonstrates this notion quite perfectly, which starts out sounding like a soundtrack to a scene from a yet-to-be-made film about a giant, destructive robot, not unlike the being that adorns the album’s cover.

The song explodes somewhere shortly after the two-minute mark, all sputtering electronics, bombastic horn bursts and a determined chorus of voices, among them Stevens’ own, sounding unhinged and urgent.

The strange thing about much of the album is its initial lack of hooks: this is not a very obvious or immediate album. After the first one or two play-throughs, the listener is likely to feel exhausted and bewildered, thinking, “What the heck was that?”

Despite the initial shock, the songs begin to reveal themselves on further listens, some of them revealing catchy pop aspects that will get stuck in the listener’s head.

One such song is the delightful “I Walked,” which finds Stevens bearing more of his soul and feelings than he has on past records. A break-up song at its core, “I Walked” is a laid-back, head-bobber, subtly melancholy and not-so-subtly catchy.

Another of the album’s highlights is “I Want To Be Well,” a taut and dramatic piece that finds Stevens more self-aware and self-deprecating than he has ever been in the past.

Where the track really shines in its 2nd half, after all accompaniment drops out of the mix, leaving only Stevens and a melancholy electric guitar, an urgent climax and one of the album’s highest peaks.

Though “The Age of Adz” is quite intimidating on initial listens (did I mention there’s a 25-minute long closing track, which uses autotune and would require another 500 words for this writer to pick it apart properly?) the album’s rewards make repeat listens appealing and fruitful.

Though not as consistently great as “Illinois,” “The Age of Adz” marks the successful and triumphant return of this interesting contemporary musician.