Javelin

This is a magical, magnificent album – one of the best of Sufjan Stevens’ career.

Despite his quiet voice and instrumentation, his music refuses to recede into the background. It commands your attention in every conceivable way.

Javelin finds Stevens at his most vulnerable, yes, but like Carrie & Lowell, he paradoxically hides behind a wall of references and metaphor (many of which I'm sure are biblical in nature, discreetly whizzing past my woefully secular ears). Now posited in plainer language than ever before, he makes its cipher even more challenging to crack. That's what makes these records so healing to their audiences, though: the universality.

‘Javelin’ is an outstanding record, technically brilliant, and emotionally bewitching.

Javelin is a poignant snapshot of Stevens’s journey to this point in his career and pushes the boundaries of his art to their most jaw-dropping and potent. Javelin is another technicolored and honest feather in Sufjan Stevens’s hat, a feather that feels freeing and warm as the artist gives us some of his best work in years.

If ‘Carrie & Lowell’ is set to remain as Sufjan Stevens’ best, ‘Javelin’ takes a confident stride back into personal territory and certainly gives 2015 a run for its money.

It’s got at least one song that instantly joins the ranks of his very best (“Will Anybody Ever Love Me?”) and plenty that draw direct lines to previous high-water marks, both thematically and musically.

Digging further into the singer-songwriter aesthetics of Seven Swans and Carrie & Lowell, Stevens has crafted an element of rare beauty, meticulously extracted from a host of sorrows, affections, and other confounding sentiments.

Javelin is indeed a wondrous meeting of the human and the synthetic, of stripped-down immediacy and lush, impressionistic extravagance.

Sufjan Stevens’ musical journeying over the past two decades comes to its fullness as he grapples with these concepts. Every piece fits perfectly, but more than that, he knows what sort of puzzle to construct.

Most songs here start bijou and intimate, and swell to a clanging, polyphonic crescendo. My Little Red Fox begins by underlining the similarities between Stevens and Elliott Smith, before building to a rococo fantasia. Shit Talk features Bryce Dessner on guitar and stretches to eight minutes of shape-shifting, elegiac misery.

It doesn’t pack quite the same melancholy, melodic punch as Carrie and Lowell. But it’s lovely to feel all the heavy stuff just breeze past you.

Javelin is an album about the need to be loved, agape and philia, and Stevens shows that he can write about both without trivializing or minimizing the importance of either.

Perhaps no album could tie together all the diverse strands of Stevens’ musical career but, as it ranges from lo-fi singer-songwriter to baroque orchestration to opaque electronics to warped pop, Javelin comes surprisingly close: a remarkable achievement in itself. That it sounds like a holisitic album, one that flows rather than fractures, is remarkable, too – but it does, carrying the listener along with it as it goes.

It’s a return to “full singer-songwriter” Stevens, in a way, but by bringing together sonics from throughout his career and coupling it with frank and intimate lyricism, the gorgeous ‘Javelin’ feels like a fresh take from the cult hero.

A somnambulist journey into an ornate dream, Javelin may not be his masterpiece but it is the work of a master.

His intimate vocals are bolstered by the addition of celestial choral harmonies, and his production is immense, yet every layered instrument and rackety beat feels meticulously deliberate.

Still adept at spectacular, if somewhat opaque intimacy, he enchants on My Red Little Fox, with its baroque recorders. [Nov 2023, p.85]

Javelin sounds like a proper Sufjan Stevens album, picking up the lyrical and sonic threads of Carrie & Lowell and 2010's The Age Of Adz. [Nov 2023, p.22]

These contrasts—between the intimate and the grand, the divine and the natural—dovetails with what Stevens has always done best as a songwriter: bridging the universal and the personal. Javelin doesn’t just feel like a return to form—it feels resurgent.