The Age of Adz - Sufjan Stevens, Hipsters, and the Decline of Indie Authenticity ****1/2

It’s been over five years since Illinois was released. That’s enough time for a generation of would-be sensitive souls to go through their indie phase—to fill up a basement with CDs of Sigur Rós, The Decemberists, and Fleet Foxes. To fill iPods with Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, and Frightened Rabbit. To fill their minds with overwrought Pitchfork reviews. Enough time to fill their memories with visions of driving down endless northeastern highways on family vacations with the first alien creaking notes of “Concerning the UFO Sightings Near Highland, Illinois.” 

It makes sense, then, that the anticipation surrounding the announcement of Age of Adz, Sufjan Stevens’ tenth album, and first substantial one in half a decade was no less than momentous. For many of this generation, Illinois was the introduction to a realm of identity—that of a distinctly American indie aesthetic. It suggested the possibility of a vivid, Whitman-esque America, a still living folk tradition, and a future of authentic experiences bound up in washed out photos and honest-to-God emotion. Blogotheque videos of wandering troubadours and spontaneous parties proselytized people to this world. The Shins hammered the point home.

So The Age of Adz has a particular resonance with many of its listeners. Very consciously it asks, five years on, does the indie aesthetic hold up? And comes up with a resounding, “No, but isn’t it better that way?”

There are people who are going to hate this new album. While scraps of it recall Sufjan’s rhapsodic earlier work, most of it is almost willfully resistant to his former aesthetic. For others, though, it’s a beautiful, schizophrenic trip through the head of the thirty-five year old eccentric. Songs move from states of spite and jealousy into those of fear, from fatigue into bursts of wonder.

“I’ve lost the will to fight,” he exalts in the disc’s finest moment, the stirring eight-minute long “Age of Adz.” Schizoid electronic percussion pulses like thunder as he patiently layers each distinctive sound—trumpets, a choir echoing an earlier melody. It’s well-worn territory for the Brooklyn songwriter, even the emphasis upon electronics, but there’s an intimate desperation here lacking in prior works. Morbidity thrives, likely brought on in mixed parts by Stevens’ increasing distance from his twenties and the debilitating virus he contracted while recording.

Perhaps more obvious, though, is the album’s self-reflexivity. From the opener, “Futile Devices,” Sufjan is knocking the idea of the confessional songwriter he once embodied. The song’s title refers to words. And as if to drag out of the point, he stays on the same chord the song through, layering waves of piano and loops of clicking strings to build tension in a way he experimented with on the All Delighted People EP. There is nothing to listen to but Stevens decrying the very words he’s singing: “I think of you as my brother/Although that sounds dumb.”

Also? Not a half bad song.

Along with “I Walked,” and “Too Much,” “Age of Adz” forms a trio of glitchy compositions using the same general framework—a basic melody rounded out with chaotic electronica and traditional instrumentation, that then morphs into an orchestral section only to regroup and work to a furious conclusion.

After this trio, the album divides itself with “Now That I’m Older.” It’s the Sufjan elegy stripped of its conventions of literary allusions and suggestions of escape. “There's so much travel,” he bemoans, ghostly backing vocals curling behind him, before mysteriously adding “Now that I’m older, someone else can see it for myself.” On the surface, it’s about giving into the past, and passing the myth of American travel beautifully elegized on “Chicago” on to another generation. A closer glance, though, will show the song is just as much about the confusion of aging, the inability to maintain certainty as time passes. The kind of certainty with which a man once “crying… for freedom” might be familiar.

On The Age of Adz’s second half, though, he’s also lamenting the loss of this travel-entwined indie identity. With one of the album’s most instantly identifiable lyrics, Stevens romantically recalls “we set out once with folded shirts/With hairy chests and well rehearsed.” He’s in love with the glory of this moment, and it shows. By the second time around, flutes twirl, cymbals crash, and voices join in to raise the line into a youthful rally cry. At once, he’s invigorating the moment and saying it’s a sham, “well rehearsed.” Staking it out on the road becomes just another attempt to grab up the myth of travel.

A 2009 interview had Sufjan saying “the CD is obsolete and the LP is kinda nostalgic. I'm wondering, 'What's the value of my work once these forms are obsolete and everyone's just downloading music?'” It reflects a fear, in the age of instant-accessibility, that music has been drained of its soul, reduced into a sort of mechanical exchange. This goes doubly for Sufjan’s brand of authenticity-based indie, a category thriving on the suggestion of emotional resonance and honesty. If these become features of another constructed product, the entire genre’s endeavor of the authentic becomes impossible.

Rob Horning summarizes these fears in “The Death of the Hipster,” where he discusses hipsterism as "a kind of permanent cultural middleman in hypermediated late capitalism, selling out alternative sources of social power developed by outsider groups.” Hipsterism, the ultimate symbol of indie chic, ironically comes to embody the nightmare situation of indie—the possibility that its alternative appeal can be as carefully constructed and commercialized as Ke$ha and Lady Gaga. Rather than exuding individuality, indie becomes just another way of shackling someone to group mentality. It’s a concern only amplified as the line between “indie” and “mainstream” becomes more blurred. What once was a label for DIY punk rockers is now bestowed on chart toppers like Arcade Fire and dominated by major record labels.

The Age of Adz, however, denies the marketability, mostly through rejecting what formerly defined indie itself. Dismissing the instant consumption of MP3s, songs stretch to such absurd lengths as to reject their commerciality. The premise came up on Coldplay’s Viva la Vida LP, which bundled multiple songs into a single track to discourage shuffled listening, although no one’s bound to give Chris Martin credit for reflecting the anxieties of his time.

On “Impossible Soul,” though, Sufjan does just that, packing every genre he can gather into more than 25 minutes of careening beauty, simultaneously disregarding the conventions of commercial music and of indie. The song isn’t easily consumed—there’s an interminable midsection that seems to be there just to bloat out the song. The sheer creativity on display here, though, is astounding. And for every misstep there’s a moment like the end, where spasms of vocoder give way to a count off, leading to the goofiest moment Stevens has ever recorded: A count off leading to the cheerleading chant, “it's a long life/Only one last chance/Couldn't get much better/Do you wanna dance?”

It’s not just mindless exuberance, though. After seventy-four minutes of criticism of his former aesthetic, the ending of “Impossible Soul” comes as Stevens embracing music for its own sake. Using the vocoder, Sufjan identifies himself more with T-Pain than other fellow sensitive souls. The robotic voice is his transformation past the authentic, a place explicitly marked with the mechanicality that indie is so anxious about.

By the end, he tones down the chaos to a jumping finger-picked guitar and his own unaltered voice. “Girl I want nothing less than pleasure," he coos, stressing music as enjoyable in itself, rather than as an identity. In an interview with The Quietus this year, he sums this up bluntly: “Categories are outdated, they’re all antiquated. They’re not relevant to the age of the download.” For a man preaching the death of whatever indie used to mean, he seems pretty damn calm.