Sufjan Stevens: Illinois
(Asthmatic Kitty/Sounds Familyre)
8 Blips out of 10 By August Brown

Sufjan Stevens almost wastes one of Illinois’ best melodies on a song about murderous clowns. On paper, “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.” looks downright embarrassing – a precocious narrative trying to find the emotional truth behind a fat guy who cut up teenagers while wearing a red rubber nose and a fright wig. But then you hear it – the sweeping fingerpicking, the gentle harmonies, the heart-stopping falsetto – and it all sort of works out in the end, killer clowns or not.

Illinois is a mammoth 22-song concept folk album bursting with ideas that succeed better than they probably should. Forgive the gimmickry behind Stevens’ alleged 50 albums on 50 states project (at this rate, he’ll be into his eighties by the time he hits Hawaii). Despite his lyrical bend towards the Lincoln-Douglas debates and Wrigley’s gum, Illinois is not nearly as Schoolhouse Rock as it sounds, and the songs themselves are sincere, inventive and messily joyful.

Stevens has atways maintained a tenuous relationship with contemporary culture. He seems to want to back out of it, ironically lacerate it and snuggle up next to it all at once. This complicated (and subtly truthful) worldview is most fully realized on “Casmir Pulaski Day,” one of the many songs far more intimate than their titles would suggest. The story deals with a childhood friend dying of bone cancer – “Tuesday night at the Bible study/ we lift our heads and pray over your body/ But nothing ever happens.”

It looks like Stevens is sticking it to the fundamentalist Christian snake handlers. But you don’t explore this subject matter without having affection for it yourself. And on “Chicago,” the album’s centerpiece and first single, Stevens is joined by what sounds like a thirty-strong youth-group choir to sing “All things go/ to recreate us,” a teetering, lovesick acceptance of dying and being born again, Christian or otherwise.

But even at a surface level. Illinois is still gorgeous. Given the critical and relative commercial (read: O.C. soundtrack) success of Seven Swans. Stevens is playing for keeps with a small armada of brass bands, banjos and electronic gadgetry. “Come On! Feel the Illinoise” sets a John Philip Sousa march to a grade-school game of musical chairs, and the lazy front-porch pluck of “Decatur” is tasteful and heartfelt. There’s nothing quite as devastating as his Michigan album’s “For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fathers in Ypsilanti,” but at this rate, he’s bound to find it somewhere in America.