Photo credit: CJ Foeckler
The last time Sufjan Stevens played Milwaukee, it was Christmas, and he was in a particularly jovial mood. As part of a traveling show titled “Surfjohn Stevens Christmas Sing-A-Long: Seasonal Affective Disorder Yuletide Disaster Pageant On Ice,” he showered the crowd with puns and confetti between covers of holiday jingles, which he selected by spinning a Wheel of Christmas. Though his enthusiasm for the holiday was genuine, that shtick-heavy show exemplified why some critics soured on Stevens in the decade following his 2005 breakthrough Illinois, the second of a facetiously proposed anthology of albums about all 50 states. Even when his lyrical and compositional gifts are undeniable, it can be difficult to get past the precious packaging. When he lays it on, he lays it on thick.
The mood couldn’t have been further removed from the heightened kitsch of that Christmas circus when Stevens returned to Milwaukee for a solemn show at the Riverside Theater Thursday night. He’s touring behind his new Carrie & Lowell, a quirk-free, achingly personal album that seems to address every major criticism that’s been lobbed at him since Illinois. Resisting the experimental indulgences of his dense, 2010 electro-symphony The Age of Adz, it captures some of the most straightforward songwriting of his career, as Stevens pays respects to his troubled late mother, whose parental lapses still linger. It’s hard to imagine even Stevens’ most ardent detractors making it through the record without choking up.
Supported by a versatile four-piece band and a touching lights display, Stevens played the album in its entirety, albeit with some creative license. Every three songs or so, he indulged in the kind of embellishment he must have had to work hard to resist in the studio, redirecting his arrangements to a showy crescendo or an electronic breakdown, effectively remixing himself. The set frequently played like an alternate imagining of Carrie & Lowell, teasing what the record might have sounded like had Stevens broadened its perimeters a bit. While none of these fresh takes improved on the originals, the variety helped break up an album that was a little too heavy to take in all at once.
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Carrie & Lowell casts such a pall that it was a relief when he completed it. The previously hushed audience responded with yips and hollers, as if eager to break the mood Stevens had spent the last 50 minutes setting. But the show only lightened so much. Addressing the crowd for the first time, Stevens shared some memories of his great grandmother’s funeral, then dedicated the rest of the night mostly to downtrodden numbers from his earlier albums, including several from Carrie & Lowell’s spiritual predecessor Seven Swans. Even when he ended his encore with the Illinois showstopper “Chicago,” it was something less than a party. Like a handful of Carrie & Lowell songs before it, the track was radically reworked, boiled down from a symphonic pep rally to a gnarly, synth-rock reduction. In keeping with the spirit of the night, it felt like a withholding. He played the song the crowd wanted, but denied them the cheer.
