Thursday, July 14, 2005
Feel the Illinoise
The latest from Sufjan Stevens is now available for public consumption. Rolling Stone gives it four stars:
On Illinois, he brings the religious feel of Seven Swans to his Fifty States Project, for a sprawling twenty-two-track tour of the Prairie State. It's part Schoolhouse Rock history lesson, part hippie Bible study. It has songs about UFO sightings, prairie fires, the Civil War, the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, the poet Carl Sandburg and the Cubs.

And the Incarnation. Don't forget Incarnation. You won't find the "I" word in Rolling Stone but that is what you get on the tracks "Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, IL" and "The Seer's Tower."

Pitchfork also features the album among their best new music:
Stevens dutifully celebrates and indicts all the appropriate landmarks, isolating the highest and lowest points in Illinois history, but at its best, the album makes America feel very small and very real: A boy crying in a van, a girl with bone cancer, stepmothers, parades, bandstands, presidents, UFOs, cream of wheat, trains after dark, a serial killer, Bible study.

posted by Peter at 1:16 PM
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