The Age of Adz [2023 Vesuvius Vinyl]

The Age of Adz (pronounced Odds) is Sufjan Stevens’ first full-length
collection of original songs since 2005’s conceptual pop opus Illinois. This
new album is probably his most unusual, first, for its lack of conceptual
underpinnings, and second, for its extensive use of electronics. The album
almost entirely eschews the songwriter’s former tools of the trade: namely,
acoustic instruments that accompany an expansive narrative scope.
While the sounds on this record are distinctly “artificial” (drums machines
and analog synthesizers reign supreme), the proclamations of the songs
are unabashedly visceral, sung loudly, with a backdrop of insistent orchestration.
The result is an album that is perhaps more vibrant, more primary,
and more explicit than anything Sufjan has done before, incorporating
themes that are neither historical nor civic, but rather personal and primal
(if even a little juvenile). Love, sex, death, disease, illness, anxiety, and
suicide make appearances in an aggressive (and sometimes danceable)
tapestry of electronic pop, conveyed with the urgency, immediacy, and
anxiety of primary colors.

TRACK LISTING
1. Futile Devices - 2:11
2. Too Much - 6:44
3. Age of Adz - 8:00
4. I Walked - 5:01
5. Now That I’m Older - 4:56
6. Get Real Get Right - 5:10
7. Bad Communication - 2:24
8. Vesuvius - 5:26
9. All for Myself - 2:55
10. I Want To Be Well - 6:27
11. Impossible Soul - 25:35