★★★★★
Sufjan Stevens’ back catalogue wanted for nothing before Javelin. A traversing world of folk, electronica, classical, concept and craft, he’d spent time honing and exploring, and ultimately creating a fascinating and wildly varied oeuvre.
In the sequence of Stevens’ albums, Javelin follows Reflections and The Decalogue, two ballet scores boasting intricate, evocative piano; a pop album in The Ascension, a space concept album, a collection of ekphrastic pieces written to films – the only thread between being Stevens’ commitment to creation and fascination with the capabilities of musical creation.
Dissertations could be written to explain Stevens’ discography, but no new material he releases begs such extensive analysis, because it always feels like it exists completely unitarily. Not only in the sense that it bears acclaim as one excellent listening experience outside of its predecessors, but in that Stevens, as he has with each release before, seems almost to stop time and space around his offering.
Each track chips out its niche with consuming intent, a surprisingly formulaic structure defining each, but ultimately in a way that works excellently for Stevens to flex his styles. Every track on Javelin opens in neat, familiar folk form, Stevens’ murmured vocals gleaming in the mix alongside muted, earthy guitar plucking, gentle acoustics. There are some of his best nestled in there, too, not competing for space with the similar sonics across the record, but shining with practice and with soul.
A cursory glance at ‘Shit Talk’s’ eight-minute runtime could make you assume you’re in for something of an epic, but even without the tip-off, the understated opening flutters and fizzes with elastic potential that is realised in a soaring expanse we come to meet later on. Prior single ‘Will Anybody Ever Love Me?’ is bleak and deftly threaded with a tapestry of feeling in hyper-characteristic style; “My Red Little Fox” combines Stevens’ storytelling expertise with his more typical mode of songwriting, and makes for one of the album’s most subtly brilliant moments.
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Where Stevens exceeds the expected, then, is in each track’s denouement. Again, the slow-burning ascent of ‘Shit Talk’ is one of the best examples, with its heavenly catharsis of sound building across choral arrangements, lush strings, and hypnotic production. But the structure is the blueprint that drives each track on Javelin, and it’s equally transfixing when it only takes one minute and twenty-two seconds to ebb and flow (as on ‘Javelin (To Have And To Hold)’).
From the vulnerability of the opening narrative to the softly desperate repetitions of “It’s a terrible thought, to have and hold” that close the track, the title track does its job as a microcosm of the sound and the emotion that Stevens explores at length elsewhere.
Photograph: Sufjan Stevens
Javelin doesn’t necessarily round out Stevens’ discography, simply because it hasn’t needed rounding out for a long time. That doesn’t even really seem like something Stevens sets out to do; rather, the variations in his creative exploits seem to come as naturally as breathing.
What Javelin adds is a remarkable, powerful consistency – of emotional intensity, of passion, of ability to turn introspection into something universally shared. It’s a consistency that makes Stevens and everything he creates a treasure.
