Sufjan Stevens has long evaded easy categorization — musically, romantically, philosophically. He’s impossible to nail down, like David dodging King Saul’s spear in the Book of Samuel, a story Stevens seemingly references on the title track of his tenth solo album, Javelin: “Searching through the snow / For the javelin I had not / Meant to throw right at you / For if it had hit its mark / There’d be blood in the place / Where you stood.†It’s a slippery song about a slippery text. Basking in plucked guitars and cascading piano lines, it makes you wonder whether Stevens is meditating on the flesh or the spirit; the bond between David and Saul’s son Jonathan — two men the King James Version describes as having souls that were knitted together as one — arouses the same divergent readings. Longtime listeners might recognize this smudging of the cosmic and carnal as the method Stevens used to devastating effect on Illinois’s “Casimir Pulaski Day†(“Tuesday night at the Bible study / We lift our hands and pray over your body / But nothing ever happens / I remember, at Michael’s house / In the living room when you kissed my neck / And I almost touched your blouseâ€) and Seven Swans’ “To Be Alone With You†(“To be alone with me / You went up on a tree / I’ve never known a man who loved meâ€). But while Javelin is being lauded as a return to peak singer-songwriter form — an acoustic reset following the synth fixation of Aporia and Convocations and the dour dance-pop opus The Ascension — it actually embraces all of Stevens’s manifestations: the lover, the hymn collector, the folk singer, the mad scientist.
As busy polymaths tend to, Stevens walks us through the fullness of his creativity like he’s conducting a tour of a botanical garden, surveying an evolving palette of shapes and colors. He throws himself into a new interest with totalizing conviction, shedding aesthetics year after year while memorializing his journey through middle-America like a Bowie for the ‘burbs. When you fell in love with one incarnation, another was imminent; the glitchy maximalism of The Age of Adz edged out the twee-pop intricacy of Illinois and Michigan, which fleshed out the scrappy polyphonic ambitions of A Sun Came. Poring over maps and mastering synthesizers and learning centuries-old Christmas carols pleased the artist and kept the audience at a distance, relishing glimpses of an interior world just as intense as his studies of Adlai Stevenson, Dave Smith, or Charles Wesley. Pain filed the music down to a point. Carrie & Lowell responded to the death of Stevens’s mother with unblinking candor and stripped arrangements; Convocations mourned his father with reverberating drones. Javelin occupies a similarly dejected head space, fluctuating between densely stacked sounds and lo-fi folk, swinging rapidly from the halo of singers swirling over lead single “So You Are Tired†(“So you are tired of me / So rest your head / Turning back all that we had in our life / While I return to deathâ€) to the tape hiss and whispered vocal of the title track. “Tired†sets the pace for an album fixated on imminent endings and hungry for peace gleaned from small moments of respite like a kiss or a prayer.
Javelin opens with a good-bye and sets out on a trail that runs through the dynasty-destroying madness of Saul and the lonesome listlessness of Harvest-era Neil Young. Bright, sweet melodies and alluring choral arrangements provide cover for lyrics that gouge at the heart like rogues’ daggers: “Tie me to a tiny wooden raft / Burn my body, point me to the undertow / Push me off into the void at last / Watch me drift and watch me struggle, let me go.†Even the uplifting moments skew toward the macabre. “Rest assured,†the gentle “Genuflecting Ghost†promises in a lilting chorus, “empires will fall.†“Jesus lift me up to a higher plane,†the psych-folk gem “Everything That Rises†exclaims. “Can you come around before I go insane?†An artifact of a tumultuous decade, Javelin is quietly waiting for the other shoe to drop, struggling to make better use of the time available to us and lamenting actions that complicate the process. Love is portrayed with a mythic bombast, a trademark for a songwriter whose penchant for allegory has flourished across compositions referencing volcanos and the Epic of Gilgamesh. “Kiss me with the fire of gods,†“My Little Red Fox†beseeches, not long after extending an invitation to “drink ’til it’s Pentecost.†Bouncing between the immediacy of physical contact and the incorporeal infinity of death, between the bedroom and the graveyard, Javelin lingers on the core dilemma the opener “Goodbye Evergreen†outlines: “Everything heaven sent / Must burn out in the end.â€
“Evergreen†exemplifies Javelin’s commitment to wrapping chilling truths in gorgeous packaging. It balances the orchestral extravagance of “The Age of Adz†and the braying minimalism of Convocations, as a boisterous guitar riff collapses into a drone that’s slowly swarmed by a flock of flutes. It’s a standoff between pregnant silences and vibrant harmonies, an examination of two potential responses to the certainty of decay: dissociation and dedication. It takes big swings and shoulders hard hits but does not persevere quietly. “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?†tussles with discouragement while ever more voices and instruments accumulate, responding to the question in the title by piling on more voices as the arrangement blossoms, flutes whistling at the margins of the mix like bird calls. Yes, we will all eventually meet our fate as a maggot’s dinner, Javelin communicates through the balance of mortal concerns and plush instrumentation, but there is indescribable beauty to seek out first.
Days before the release of “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?†Stevens revealed on Tumblr that he had been diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, an auto-immune disorder, which left him temporarily unable to walk. On the day Javelin landed, he dedicated the album to his partner, Evans Richardson IV, former chief of staff at the Studio Museum in Harlem, who died in April: “I know relationships can be very difficult sometimes, but it’s always worth it to put in the hard work and care for the ones you love, especially the beautiful ones, who are few and far between.†Questions that had long floated on forum threads unpacking tiny details like the invocation of the closeness between Alexander the Great and his second-in-command, Hephaestion, in “The Mystery of Love†were suddenly covered in the New York Post: “Singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens publicly addresses sexuality …†It’s not that the subject had never come up before. He just let the work speak, and if you related to the coy elegance of the church musician and the commitment to being different in a community built on tradition, the resisting unrelenting pressure to fit into prefabricated experiences of sex and gender, maybe you’ve heard a little something more in Seven Swans and Illinois than people who had been admiring only the banjos and falsettos. Maybe you admired the exercise of the freedom to be inscrutable. Whether or not you choose to view Javelin through the lens of what its author has revealed since its release, interpreting the more calamitous lyrics as the worries of a lover anticipating the solitude of bereavement, its message of steadfastness and appreciation of the unique gifts we all bring to the table is crystal clear by the time his cover of Neil Young’s “There’s a World†spells it out: “There’s a world you’re living in / No one else has your part.â€