Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 04/07/05
Label: Rough Trade

The second instalment in Sufjan's professed aim to immortalise all 50 American States album-by-album, first impressions of this ambitious record suggest a work of such breadth it could encompass the entire Northern half of that vast country.

Combining the stripped banjo folk of his last album, "Seven Swans", with tracks that throw in the kitchen sink, taps and all, in the manner of "Michigan", Stevens' remarkable musical growth spurt shows no sign of letting up. He produces all 21 songs and plays most instruments - somewhere around 30 in total. In a time when it seems near impossible to sell a record without that irritating tick, the slide up and down the vocal register affected by Dido, KT Tunstal, Chris Martin et at, Sufjan's voice is a revelation. Often employed only at crucial narrative junctures, it's so much more resonant than their hollow stylisation.

Once you've taken in how wonderful it sounds, it'll be time to thrill at how much of it there is, then how dense it all is. Not simply wonderful music, "Illinoise" is a collection of short stories set to song. Meticulously researched histories, in most cases, whose subject matter veers from the folklore of "Concerning The UFO Sighting Near Highland, IL" to the intensely personal histories of "The Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out to Get Us!" and " Casimir Pulaski Day".

Sufjan studied creative writing and - granted a musician's liberty to blend fact and fiction in a way that would see Eric Hobsbawn blackballed from the local historical society - he brings the past vividly to life. "John Wayne Gacy Jr." imagines the human characters behind the story of the Chicago serial killer in such a way that his victims seem almost to haunt the song.

Delivering the lines "Twenty-seven people, even more / They were boys / With their cars, summer jobs / Oh my God", he is so affected by the horror of Gacy's crimes we can imagine him as one of the policemen that discovered the bodies beneath the house or a jury member in the trial. But Stevens' remarkable empathy doesn't end there. In the song's closing bars he concludes: "And in my best behaviour / I am really just like him / Look beneath the floorboards / For the secrets I have hid."

It's this intertwining of personal spiritual meditations, with the historical fabric making up his chosen state which elevates this record. Far more than mere experimental folk pop LP, short historical episodes, lushly produced indie love-in or any of the other character-traits which, alone, would make "Illinoise" a fine album by anyone else's standards, it's a triumphant songwriting progression. The introspective, religious (Stevens is a devout Christian) concerns of "Seven Swans" are merged with the historically epic sweep of "Michigan" to produce something far greater than the sum of its parts.

Whether he continues to document the remaining 48 states or veers off in another conceptual direction, you'd be a fool not to follow the story.

    by James Poletti