Blender - No 50 - August 2006
(click thumbnail for full-size image)
Reviewed by Richard Gehr
With two states down and 48 to go in his long march to document our big funky mess of a country, this dove-throated indie bard’s already buying time with an album’s worth of “shamelessly compiled” (his words) remainders from last year’s much-ballyhooed Illinois. “I made a lot of mistakes,” he admitted in that album’s wistful “Chicago” - and he makes another by including three more gorgeous but superfluous versions of that song here. Fortunately, there’s still plenty of room for exquisite parables sung over lush but skronky arrangements and minimalist beats. The lyrics offset high-tech theology (”God is dead,” Sufjan laments in “Dear Mr. Supercomputer”), with musings on novelist Saul Bellow and the man who discovered Pluto - it’s like School House Rock for hip kids.
Download: “Saul Bellow,” “Pittsfield”