Sufjan Stevens: Ascension | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- After the intensely personal eulogy to his mother, 2015’s Carrie & Lowell and a career that’s often been characterised by introspective analysis, it seems Sufjan Stevens has explicitly turned his gaze back to the world around him. His new, solo full-length, Ascension, presents as a manifesto, a toolkit for confronting the times and sorting out the problems of this divided world. It’s a desire he’s spoken about at length: “My objective for this album was simple: Interrogate the world around you. Question anything that doesn’t hold water. Exterminate all bullshit. Be part of the solution or get out of the way. Keep it real. Keep it true. Keep it simple. Keep it moving.” So far, so clear, a clarion call to action - or is it? Whether it’s deceptive marketing, Sufjan’s own obfuscation or just my muddle-headed lack of understanding, Ascension is not at all what I was expecting.

In those few sentences from the man, above, you can feel the fervour, the urgency of his desire for change. As with any revolutionary cause the clash of ideals and reality is intense, violent and doesn’t necessarily produce the results intended. When Sufjan describes Ascension as a “lush, editorial pop album”, I’m not convinced that’s what I hear. I mean, lush it certainly is: bonding ambient synth-pop to beats, Sufjan’s ever-whispering voice can become drowned in the torrent of synthetic sound. It shares with pop music the quality of being immediate and tuneful - this isn’t the avant-garde mayhem of 2010’s Age Of Adz, but where his other recent album of artificial sounds, Aporia, relaxed into ambient and new age easiness, it’s like Ascension sits in the middle between it and Adz: its sweetness often drowned out by distortion and abandoning new wave pop as the music clenches its fists and crashes out industrial beats.

Whatever Sufjan thinks pop is these days, I’m not sure that’s how this record should be judged. Thinking back to Carrie & Lowell, its endlessly speeding, skeletal structure picked out on the banjo was both sparse and kind of intimidating. The meat of that record, what made it a masterpiece, was the swarm of lyrics that quietly tumbled out, half-hidden by the music. That might have been an album of indie-folk and this might be industrial dance-pop, but the approach on Ascension is actually very similar. The songs move by at a reckless clip as the brilliant, synthetic harmonies grow and grow in force. Stevens’ Ascension is often like a roaring wind-tunnel and in it, many times, you’ll find yourself struggling, bowed-down down by the onslaught, trying to hold on to the words, the voice in the tempest, the whisper nearly lost in the wind.

So, when you grab those words from out of the maelstrom, what do you get? From what I had read I was expecting a political record and … it really isn’t. I mean, not in the obvious sense. Sufjan’s writing is certainly impassioned but just about every song here is more like a passion play than political screed: full of questioning, anguish, a search for redemption, something better than this terrible impasse at which we’ve arrived.

When I say ‘we’ and although there are broader questions of philosophy and -as always with Sufjan- religion, most of his attention is at a very personal level: interrogating his own soul and fretting over how it fits into a world of jagged edges. The scope is intimate, to such an extent that it often refuses to tell you what it is about that outside world is so problematic. Take the lyrics from early single Video Game “I don’t wanna be your personal Jesus / I don’t wanna live inside of that flame / In a way I wanna be my own believer / I don’t wanna play your video game / I don’t wanna be the center of the universe / I don’t wanna be a part of that shame / In a way I wanna be my own redeemer / I don’t wanna play your video game.” It’s a litany of rejections -don’t put your crap on me- but what does it finally tell you? Sufjan doesn’t live video games? He has a low-key messiah complex? Maybe he doesn’t like that Depeche Mode song?

Of course it’s not really fair to read it all at a surface level, to fail to try and understand whatever metaphors or allegories are being worked here, but at many of its most expansive moments, Ascension’s political project remains stubbornly abstruse and rigidly focussed on the personal. Take the epic sweep of America: strewn with religious icons, casting fretful shadows everywhere: “Is it love you’re after? / A sign of the flood or one more disaster / Don’t do to me what you did to America / Don’t do to me what you did to America.” This isn’t a grand vision or action plan, it’s a crisis of faith: “I’m ashamed to admit I no longer believe.” The most it offers is a plea: “Don’t do to me what you did to America.” Don’t get me wrong, I think these are entirely legitimate thoughts to be having. As that most unusual of things, a devout but thoroughly liberal Christian and as America’s evangelicals scratch their heads about whether they can reconcile four more years of Trump with their God, it must be a time of great personal upset for Sufjan.

It’s sometimes possible to forget that Sufjan Stevens has a first-class mind and often writes like a religious scholar. When he actually owns up to just what this record is about, it’s poignant, beautiful and, in it’s own way, very worthy. You’ll get it in the album’s title track, hidden way down, second to last. “And now it strikes me / Far too late again / That I should answer for myself / As the ascension falls upon me / And now it frightens me / The thought against my chest / To think I was asking for a reason / Explaining why everything’s a total mess / And now it frightens me / The dreams that I possess / To think that I was acting like a believer / When I was just angry and depressed / And to everything there is no meaning / A season of pain and hopelessness / I shouldn’t have looked for revelation / I should have resigned myself to this / I thought I could change the world around me / I thought I could change the world for best / I thought I was called in convocation / I thought I was sanctified and blessed / But now it strengthens me to know the truth at last / That everything comes from consummation / And everything comes with consequence / And I did it all with exaltation / While you did it all with hopelessness / Yes I did it all with adoration / While you killed it off with all of your holiness / One love.”

That’s finally what Ascension is: a raking over of one man’s belief, an anguished plea, a midnight vigil, for someone whose faith is about caring for others, fundamentally confronted by those for whom faith is a dividing blade, to strike down the heretics. As such it’s much more of a quest for Sufjan himself than it is for most of his listenership, although there are definitely connections to be made between it and other burning political questions, the broadest being “why are we so hopelessly divided?’ There are so few easy answers and, contemporarily, we must be grateful for those resolutions which present themselves. In this case, if that song is to be believed, Sufjan has found some kind of peace within himself and in it, the strength to carry on. It is only to be hoped that we can all find something of the same.

- Chris Cobcroft.