Theres electronic drums, bass and vocoder filling up the space around the songs and far removed from Seven Swans. Theres a much more raw emotion in the songs, such as a i want to be well. SS's heavenly harmonies contrasting against the electronic maze and false reality of synthesized sound.
So listening through the first time, it swallows me up, more and more snatches of songs and refrains, repeating phrases, what am i thinking? what am i thinking? And we get to the last track "Impossible Soul" and glide through 25 minutes of introspection and beseeching, more, more immersed in SS's vision, to its diminuendo end.
I'll play it through again soon, but next came a day of web searches to find live recordings of the songs on You Tube from concerts SS gave last year. Not really disappointing to see the music played to an audience, more understanding of the way the songs are made up and improvised. You get to see what sort of musicians SS is working with, the instruments they are using and how they can cut up the songs afresh. But the record itself, very different. bleak, seems more .. final.
So its a record thats impossible to just upload to ipod and wait to appear on random playlists, its also a record that shouldnt just be treated as another mediafire grab to fill up the Gigabytes. The CD packaging was a bit shocking too, illustrations by Royal Robertson, an artist ive not heard of but compulsive and apparently schizophrenic. No lyric sheets, no cluees to who played on the record. Nothing to clasp to but the CD music itself
So my resolve is - leave it off my itunes, listen to it alone, all the way through, study it and enjoy the ownership of something unique. I recommend it, of course, but not as an introduction to Sufjan Stevens, but perhaps as an example to musicians who think too much about explaining their music and less about reaching inside
