Lemon yogurt. A video store. We’re all gonna die.
Such are the components of Carrie and Lowell, affirming that Sufjan Stevens still doesn’t wander from the mundane or the morbid. He’s made a career of breathtaking and grandiose songs about UFOs, serial killers, bone cancer and unemployed Michiganders, and his latest album doesn’t hesitate to stray from his bread and butter of death, melancholia and the luster of the everyday.
But to many, this album will sound like that of a different man. Gone are the brass arrangements and glockenspiels of Illinoise, gone are the crashing synths and shouts of The Age of Adz. What we have instead is a refined version of the Stevens heard on Seven Swans, Michigan and his earliest works. Gone is the showmanship, the melodrama and theater.
The bare-bones arrangements of Carrie and Lowell, Stevens’ first album since 2010, underlie the deeply personal nature of the subject: Stevens’ deceased mother and stepfather, who manages Stevens’ label, Asthmatic Kitty Records. The songs center around his grief for his mother, who abandoned him as a child and died in 2012. It also references poignant memories of his childhood summers spent in Oregon visiting her and his stepfather in Oregon and his ever-present Christianity. Were this the lovably over-the-top and bold Sufjan of the first half of 2000s, this album could possibly be known as Oregone, but the Sufjan Stevens who promised a different album for each of the 50 states is no more, replaced by a humbled and sorrowful man.
The album is dominated by Stevens’ multi-tracked vocals, whispery and fragile as usual, always threatening to spiral into the stratosphere in his ghostly falsetto. The falsetto is characteristic of the lyrical content, which pleads and talks to the phantoms of his mother and memories.
Songs range from simple finger-picked tunes, like “Carrie and Lowell” and “Eugene,” to more elaborate ballads, many of which incorporate synths in the most unobtrusive way possible. The highlight is easily the beautiful pulsing beat at the end of the record’s second single and best song, “Should Have Known Better,” which drives the somber song along towards sole uplifting ending for a song on the album, with Sufjan ambiguously singing “My brother had a daughter/The beauty that she brings, illumination, illumination..."
Other highlights include the lyrically chameleonic “Eugene,” which begins with Stevens’ memories of childhood summers spent with a man who calls him Subaru and teaches him to swim, and ends with him professing to his mother his lonely drunkenness, begging “What’s the point of singing songs/If they’ll never even hear you?” In “Carrie and Lowell,” he sings of love for his family and a yearning for love in return over a pattering synth beat, soft tambourine and the trademark Sufjan banjo.
The climax of the album occurs during “The Only Thing”, which starts with just Sufjan and his guitar but erupts midway through into a peal of guitar where Stevens affirms that “blind faith, God’s grace” is the only reason he continues living, alone and afraid.
The album has a low point in “John My Beloved,” but the lethargy is intentional as Stevens frankly discusses his almost painfully human love for someone, while simultaneously describing his love for Jesus’ disciple John. Shortly after, “No Shade In the Shadow of the Cross” features tight Garfunkel-esque harmonies as Stevens openly questions his faith and dives into empty substance abuse.
The album comes to a stately close with “Blue Bucket of Gold” which is led by elegant piano chords, Stevens’ audible breaths and an occasional synth whine, only to finish in a beautiful haze of vapory falsetto and low strings.
Despite the deliberate beauty of the last song, the album closes without a solid conclusion, leaving you how Stevens seems to want to be left—alone with his feelings and memories, questioning the authenticity and permanence of love and ultimately unfulfilled.
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