I slept on this one, have only really been rediscovering it this year after bouncing clean off it in 2023.
Part of the... reason why it took a while to creep up on me is because of Sufjan's previous albums. I consider Age of Adz to be one of his masterpieces, pure apocalyptic techno for an age characterized by digital anxiety.
Carrie and Lowell, is another masterpiece, much more tightly focused on the personal tragedy and on the opposite end of the stylistic spectrum (mostly rustic, nearly entirely acoustic). It came out a year before my grandfather died. I wore it out on the trip back home for the funeral.
Javelin's style is somewhere in the middle of these two very different albums, the content also an amalgam, reflecting a personal apocalypse. Sufjan's partner passed away and then he suffered a sudden and unexpected physical ailment leaving him bed ridden with a painful recovery. With that in mind, the juxtaposition of suffering and resilience is _striking_. The tension in style is the tension in its themes, navigating the push and pull of despair and hope. I didn't know what to do with this, until I listened a little more deeply and found tragedy somehow more raw than Lowell (Goodbye Evergreen) and hope much more alive than in Adz (Shit Talk).
Is it weird that I, for a moment, thought "I want Will Somebody Ever Love Me played at my funeral?" Not because I personally feel this right now, but because it seems to me that that's what so much of human striving breaks down to, on an atomic level.
Beautiful album. Highly recommended. show more
