This new Sufjan Stevens album is terrible. I didn't want to start this review just saying it outright like that, but I can't help it. If you're a fan of it, for some unknown reason I will never be able to understand, you can safely stop reading now, because I'm not going to be very kind.

When I'm attempting to make music in iSequence for iPad, or in Ableton, or in any form at all, I tend to stay pretty in tune to what sounds appropriate. If I make something that sounds too busy, or has too many sour notes in it, I tend to erase it and start over. If something sounds so bad that it might be entirely broken through and through, I blank the entire slate and start the song anew.

It sounds like Sufjan Stevens didn't care to delete anything he did on this album. Songs that start off pretty ("Too Much") descend into glitchy, poorly programmed and poorly thought-out electronic sections that seem to serve no purpose at all. The title track, "Age of Adz", featured here, starts you off on the precipice of annoyance and then pulls back---"Wait," you think aloud. "Is this song actually going to be pretty all the way through?"

No. It's not. "Age of Adz" quickly descends into what I'll not-so-lovingly call the "flute trill freak out", where we're treated to an electronic influenced psychedelic breakdown composed almost solely of repetitive, endless, up and down flute trills. And why? For what reason? Does it sound good? I don't think so. Does it mean anything? Not really. It's just noise to me, and I find that myself and anyone else listening to the album around me wants desperately to skip through it.

The whole album is like this. It sounds like Sufjan created an album of genuinely good and pretty music---I'm being very polite by ignoring the song that's composed almost solely of the lyric "You gotta get good, get right with the Lord" which would normally inspire me to go off on a three paragraph tangent about how people who blindly devote themselves to religion are morons and I have a hard time respecting them in the first place but then they make horrible albums and it just makes it even worse---but then decided, "You know what? Let's make this all really ugly. Let's do it. I'm just going to click on a bunch of random notes in Ableton or Pro-Tools right now. Let's see what happens. Oh, this sounds simply terrible... how divine!"

During my second listen (my first listen lasted up until "Age of Adz", at which point I got a headache and turned it off---I swear I am not exaggerating, I literally got a headache) by the time I got to track eight, "Vesuvius", I was relieved. Here's a pretty song that isn't overwhelmed by glitches and unnecessary electronic beats. It actually feels restrained, on an album that lacks any restraint at all, but it doesn't last. After about three minutes (of people chanting "Sufjan, follow the path!") the electronics come in and basically ruin it, but then it's made even worse 45 seconds later when his choir of high school kids (or whoever they are) start singing like their voices are slowly detuning themselves...

And at that point I'm just left scratching my head.

Why would someone do this?

Why would no one tell Sufjan Stevens that he was making something that sounded bad? Is that the joy of indie music, that you can safely hang yourself and your label will tell you that it's A-OK? Did too many people get wrapped up in the myth of Sufjan Stevens being a musical genius? Was the pressure of creating a suitable follow up to Illinois just too much for Sufjan? Did he pray to his Lord and then his Lord told him, "Make really bad music, then no one will expect anything from you ever again and you can go back to comfortably making music without all that critical pressure weighing you down?"

I wanted to like this album. Despite how I feel these days about Illinois (namely that it's overwrought, self-indulgent, and my memories of my friends holding mini-"listening parties" to listen to "Casimir Pulaski Day" just to agonize over how sad that song is---despite the fact that none of them could possibly relate to it---just heightened the over-self-indulgence of the whole record), I was hoping upon hearing that this album was "heavily electronic" that a new (or a return to a) direction would be the thing I need to restore my former love of Sufjan Stevens.

But, no. This album is an awful mess. I keep reading the opinions of people who love it (they say things like "I am willing to sit through the parts of this album that are terrible for the parts that are pretty") and I just have to shake my head. Are these people merely "true believers", willing to drink the Sufjan kool-aid and follow him into the great Lord-filled beyond? Or are my ears just configured wrong? Is there actual music somewhere on this album, buried under all the glitch and hyperactive yet totally stiff and unnatural beat programming?

If there is, I can't hear it. After three listens, I'm not going to try again.

This jump in styles is going to sound lousy in the February playlist.

I tend to listen to music that no one else I know listens to. Sometimes I'll admit it's on purpose, that I purposefully seek out artists no one knows about, but other times I'll say that I just seem to be naturally drawn to music that I have never heard of before from anyone. I didn't think about it too deeply until I stumbled back onto this song in my playlist and it dawned on me.

Popular music is used so often in other mediums that it's almost impossible to not have your memory of the song co-opted in some way. There was a time that listening to Jacksonville made me think of sunny days driving around with ex-girlfriends, of feeling alive by myself and enjoying the wind blowing through my hair. Now when I hear it, I think, oh, they used that other Sufjan song (Chicago) in Little Miss Sunshine. Now I associate Sufjan Stevens with a so-so indie movie that got eighty billion Oscar nominations. Is that fair?

I guess this is also why it's hard for me to accept and even begin to appreciate recommendations from people I know personally. (Aside from the fact that recommending that I listen to MGMT is pretty stupid.) I don't want to listen to something I already associate with a person. I want to create my own interpretation, independent of everyone else. I'm creating my own memories.

This is going to make me sound pretentious (which I am, obviously, I run a website where I write nonsense for everyone to read and ask people to read it and say 'hey hey look at me isn't my taste awesome?'), but it also just blows when music gets popular, period. I remember digging this album and then six months later suddenly it was getting played at the houses of people I didn't respect. Nothing can ruin music more than a bunch of shitty people listening to it because it's suddenly popular in some scene. Now I associate Sufjan Stevens with greasy date-rapist Mexican assholes. Thanks, popularity.

Recommendations from the internet is different. Everyone listens to everything on the internet, you're not going to listen to something that at least five people currently on the internet haven't already heard (or are currently listening to), but everyone is faceless and you don't know anything about them. You can associate a recommendation with a name, but there aren't already memories there about that person. Yay, internet.

Song Note: This song is about the underground railroad. Yay!