Carrie & Lowell sounds like memory: it spans decades yet does not trade on pastiche or nostalgia. Stevens s gauzy double-tracked vocals wash across the dashboard of long-finned, drop-top Americana, yet as we race towards the coast we are reminded that sunshine leads to shadow, for this is a landscape of terminal roads, unsteady bridges, traumatic video stores, …
Canta Lechuza is an intimate, personal beast, a solo affair built lovingly from live instruments, percussion, and field recordings, all processed through electronics, computers, and synthesizers. It is an album with very defined songs, its song-structure has been labored over; choruses count bigtime, confident breakdowns and digi-pop bridges are all part and parcel of the greater good. Canta …
Carrie & Lowell sounds like memory: it spans decades yet does not trade on pastiche or nostalgia. Stevens’s gauzy double-tracked vocals wash across the dashboard of long-finned, drop-top Americana, yet as we race towards the coast we are reminded that sunshine leads to shadow, for this is a landscape of terminal roads, unsteady bridges, traumatic video stores, and …
A 22-track anthematic tone poem to the Prairie State, emphatically answering the question, “Can a songwriter express the spirit of a state he’s never called home?” Sufjan weaves various musical styles (jazz, funk, pop) and instrumental textures into a tapestry of persons famous, infamous, and anonymous, and places iconic, obscure, and ghostly. Myths, memories, and incidental anecdotes are …