5/17/2023 0 Comments Sufjan to be alone with youEspecially in the former song, which opens Seven Swans, Sufjan showcases his curious ability to change a song's grief-stricken tenor to a hopeful one on the flash. On songs like "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands" and "To Be Alone with You", Sufjan does well to collapse the distinction between divine- and human-directed affections- his "You" could apply to God and loved one alike. The raw simplicity, coupled with the stripped-down, banjo-led instrumentation, lends Seven Swans a particularly high degree of sincerity: Even if we're not taken by the subject matter, we're taken by how beautifully and personally Sufjan is taken by it. At their melodic cores, the songs on Seven Swans are equally as potent as those on Michigan, though perhaps a little rougher around the edges and generally more sparsely arranged. On similar grounds, Seven Swans partly succeeds for me because Sufjan rarely steps foot in the excess of pedantic preaching, despite the openly Christian nature of his lyrics here. Religious content, by its very faith-based nature, is passionate and fantastical, and, if not fashioned with a commensurate degree of care and artifice, the emotion exceeds the form, throwing the listener headlong into the realm of melodrama and self-parody (confer all "Christian rock" bands).įrank Rich himself talks of The Passion's unbridled over-the-toppity, the film "constructed like nothing so much as a porn movie." Where The Passion fails artistically for Rich is not in its highly charged subject matter, but in its crudely considered execution. Which is not to say that Michigan and its tales of personal grief and acceptance of one's suffering were any less Christian in ethos, just that Seven Swans is so topically concerned with Christianity that a few wrong steps could easily have been a disaster. That said, skepticism still greets the release of Seven Swans, Sufjan Stevens' sparse and intimate fourth album, in which the Detroit-raised Brooklynite deals with the stories of his Christian faith most directly.
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