“The Ascension” is Sufjan Stevens in perfect form. The 80-minute record is an intricate, massive cacophony of confusion, despair, frustration, and love. It’s beautiful, it’s hideously ugly, and it’s the only record Sufjan Stevens could have made in the bizarre world we live in today.
Stevens has been an indie-music icon for many years. His albums range widely in their style—from the baroque pop of “Illinois” to the stripped-down acoustic guitar of “Carrie & Lowell.” He’s covered subject matter from issues in the U.S. to the intense personal grief of his mother’s passing.
He even wrote the soundtrack for the Oscar-winning film Call Me By Your Name. Recently, he described the Oscars in an interview with The Guardian as a “horrifying Scientology end-of-year-prom,” and representative of “everything I hate about America and popular culture.”
This comment about America is particularly striking from an artist who once planned to (and decided not to) celebrate his country by writing an album themed around each state. The Ascension is telling about how Sufjan Stevens sees America today.
His crisis is palpable throughout the album.
Now, I’m a huge Sufjan Stevens fan. I have a signed copy of “The Age of Adz,” my favourite of his albums. I waited close to 10 hours for front-row tickets to one of his live shows, where he smashed a banjo to pieces right in front of my face. It’s one of the highlights of my life.
With that in mind, I actually didn’t think I was going to love this record. I wasn’t a big fan of the instrumental album, “Aporia” that he released earlier this year. Along with the singles that were released before the album, that didn’t leave me particularly hopeful for what was to come.
Then I heard the first few erratic seconds of the opening song, “Make Me An Offer I Cannot Refuse,” and I was instantly hooked. It sounded like nothing he’d ever done before, and I had no idea what to expect next.
I should never have doubted you, Sufjan.
“The Ascension” takes the crises of the world today and sets them to a roller-coaster track. Themes of spiritual confusion and enlightenment, the climate apocalypse, the worst parts of today’s pop culture, mental illness, medication, death, the desire to be loved and the fear of a future that has never been more uncertain whiz past as you, the rider, scream down massive drops and coast on groovy jams.
The intensely personal grief and confusion of “Carrie & Lowell” has been replaced here by a much grander, more universal sense of incongruity.
Stevens has always spoken to the complexities of the human condition in such a unique and beautiful way, and it makes sense that he would capture the surreal despair of what it means to be alive in 2020 just as well.
So much of this album is about coping—how can we keep going when everything we know is falling apart around us? Stevens reaches for platitudes and Ativan, hoping to find something that will get him through, “one day at a time.”
Some parts of this album are a frenzied apocalypse dance party, pounding drums and beats that make you want to move until you forget about the looming death of mankind. In other parts, it’s a symphonic tsunami of noise, with distorted angelic choirs, huge peaks and crashes. It’s maximalist and manic, lingering and intimate, weightless and crushing all at once.
Even through the ebbs and flows of faster and slower tracks, the tension of the album is constantly building. Yet the releases it finds—the explosions in songs like “Tell Me You Love Me” that sound like musical fireworks, the frustrated screams into the void on the song “Ativan”—are never enough.
“The Ascension” is, at its core, about the incomprehensible state of affairs of the world as it is today. Even the outro offers little in terms of a resolution on how to move forward, simply a prayer repeated into the heavens: “Don’t do to me what you did to America.”
There isn’t one clear message from “The Ascension.” In some songs, it seems like love might be the answer, the one thing that saves us. In others, it feels too late for even that. I hope you give the album a listen and try to decide for yourself —or simply listen to hear Sufjan Steven’s lament for America, for himself, and for all of us.
Featured image provided by Take Aim Media.
