For a songwriter who proved so insanely prolific mid-decade, Sufjan Stevens has been fairly quiet in recent years. Excluding last year's instrumental orchestral suite The BQE, Stevens hasn't released a record since 2006 (and that record, The Avalanche: Outtakes and Extras From the Illinois Album, was an inessential supplement to the 2005 breakthrough that preceded it).
Today Stevens offered fans a taste of the songs he's been working on in the five years since Illinois, releasing without advance notice an eight-song, one-hour EP All Delighted People through his Bandcamp site. It's available for free streaming, of $5 download.
The EP finds Stevens in heavy spirits, its lengthy title track (which appears twice) describing a crisis of faith. "And all the people bowed and prayed," Stevens sings. That's not surprisingpeople are always bowing and praying in Stevens' songsbut the lyrics that follow are. "And what difference does it make?" Stevens moans. "It doesn't matter anyway, the world surrounds us with its hate." He then interpolates Paul Simon's "Sound of Silence": "Hello darkness my old friend, it breaks my heart."
Stevens songs still sound like they was recorded in a church adorned with hand-crocheted pictures of birds instead of stain glass, but they're darker than ever. "I'm tired of life," he laments in "Arnika."
As with The Avalanche, Stevens displays his gift for arrangements and his general ineptness at album sequencing (he doesn't understand what a slog it is hearing the same song twice on the same album; though the EP's second take of "All Delighted People" isn't nearly as egregious as the three versions of "Chicago" that overloaded The Avalanche). All Delighted People isn't a tight EP, but it's a generous one, well worth the five bucks.
