pass: radiobutt.blogspot.com
Year: 2004
Label: Sounds Familyre
myspace.com/illinoiseispretty
More about the band
Similar artists: Stereolab, Jim O'Rourke, Cass McCombs, The Choir Practice, Elliot Smith
AMG: 4
"After completing the first installment of his planned series of 50 records -- one album dedicated to each state in the U.S. -- indie folk overachiever Sufjan Stevens returns with Seven Swans, a collection of stripped-down, introspective musings on life, love, and faith that chart the geographic location of the heart and soul. Many of these themes were dealt with eloquently on Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State, presenting the singer/multi-instrumentalist as a first-rate interpreter of the human condition, as well as a gifted musician. [..] By the time he reaches the spirited closer, "Transfiguration," an affirming take on the Gospels that reaches an almost Polyphonic Spree crescendo, the listener has no choice but to conform -- if only for the length of the record -- to the writer's unabashed spirituality, and at just under 45 minutes, it's an easy choice to make."
Pitchfork: 8.1
"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. [..] Given Sufjan's ability to handle such dangerously effusive material as his own religion so well, it's no wonder that he aligns himself with the similarly concerned writer Flannery O'Connor, whose short story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, is recast here from the perspective of O'Connor's Mephistophelic character, The Misfit. O'Connor, as the late Yale professor Robert Dubbin noted, is unusually capable of masking the Christian mechanisms at work in her stories without cheapening them-- she effectively crafts Christian revelatory experiences into ones of universal enormity and applicability. The same comment could very well apply to Sufjan Stevens on Michigan and Seven Swans alike: A gifted musician to begin with, Sufjan invites not our religious conversions, but our innate human compassion."
Previously:
Sufjan Stevens - Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lake State
Year: 2004
Label: Sounds Familyre
myspace.com/illinoiseispretty
More about the band
Similar artists: Stereolab, Jim O'Rourke, Cass McCombs, The Choir Practice, Elliot Smith
AMG: 4
"After completing the first installment of his planned series of 50 records -- one album dedicated to each state in the U.S. -- indie folk overachiever Sufjan Stevens returns with Seven Swans, a collection of stripped-down, introspective musings on life, love, and faith that chart the geographic location of the heart and soul. Many of these themes were dealt with eloquently on Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State, presenting the singer/multi-instrumentalist as a first-rate interpreter of the human condition, as well as a gifted musician. [..] By the time he reaches the spirited closer, "Transfiguration," an affirming take on the Gospels that reaches an almost Polyphonic Spree crescendo, the listener has no choice but to conform -- if only for the length of the record -- to the writer's unabashed spirituality, and at just under 45 minutes, it's an easy choice to make."
Pitchfork: 8.1
"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. [..] Given Sufjan's ability to handle such dangerously effusive material as his own religion so well, it's no wonder that he aligns himself with the similarly concerned writer Flannery O'Connor, whose short story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, is recast here from the perspective of O'Connor's Mephistophelic character, The Misfit. O'Connor, as the late Yale professor Robert Dubbin noted, is unusually capable of masking the Christian mechanisms at work in her stories without cheapening them-- she effectively crafts Christian revelatory experiences into ones of universal enormity and applicability. The same comment could very well apply to Sufjan Stevens on Michigan and Seven Swans alike: A gifted musician to begin with, Sufjan invites not our religious conversions, but our innate human compassion."
Previously:
Sufjan Stevens - Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lake State
2 comments:
link is broken.file deleted..
can you please re-upload this? would be great if you could!
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