1) Neptune; 2) Jupiter; 3) Halley's Comet; 4) Venus; 5) Uranus; 6) Mars; 7) Black Energy; 8) Sun; 9) Tides; 10) Moon; 11) Pluto; 12) Kuiper Belt; 13) Black Hole; 14) Saturn; 15) In The Beginning; 16) Earth; 17) Mercury.
General verdict: This is NOT going down in history as the definitive musical guide to the planets; any old textbook on astronomy is about ten times as exciting.
As early as 2012, Stevens took part in a
collaborative project with contemporary classical composer Nico Muhly and with
Bruce Dessner, guitarist of The National, commissioned by a Dutch concert hall
— a conceptual piece about no less than the entire Solar System. After an
actual live performance in Amsterdam, the piece lay dormant for five more years
before the principal participants decided to reconvene and (with the final
addition of drummer James McAlister) finalize the art piece in a recording
studio. The result is Planetarium,
an album credited to all four guys at once — but since Sufjan's name comes
first on the cover, and also since he sings all the vocals, I am assuming that
it belongs in his discography anyway, regardless of the actual percentage of
his own melodic themes. And it is hardly likely I will ever tackle Nico Muhly
on his own, anyway, although it turns out that I have briefly run into him on
occasion — in particular, he had collaborated with the late Antony Hegarty (now
known as Anohni) on three of his (as-of-then) records. Besides, the album was
deemed important enough to be released on the 4AD label — the unspoken king of
all things Cosmic and Transcendental — and that should spell quality.
The concept of the record basically just
involves writing an ode to each of the planets (Pluto generously included), as
well as the Sun, the Moon, and a few accompanying phenomena for the sake of
diversity. In itself, it is simple and elegant and respectable and it has been
a whole century anyway since Holst's The
Planets, so it is odd that nobody thought of the idea earlier. Lyrically,
though, Sufjan barely even touches planetary subjects — mostly, he uses the
celestial bodies as starting reference points for all sorts of personal
ruminations (for instance, ʽNeptuneʼ refers to "strange waters" and
"drowning" and that's about it; ʽMercuryʼ mentions "running off
with it all", meaning that Greek mythology matters much, much more to this
man than little globes of cosmic dust pointlessly revolving around some silly
hot star). But musically, the arrangements are ambitious enough so that you
could think of the compositions in... astronomical terms, so to speak. Or,
should we say, astrological?
There is but one problem with Planetarium, or, rather, all of its
small problems boil down to one big problem. An album like this — a large,
76-minute long musical canvas presuming to connect matters celestial and
terrestrial, transcendental and personal — should do one of two things: it
should dazzle, or it should not exist, period. Saying «yeah, I've
heard this monster of an album that covers the entire Solar System, and it's
kinda ok» just feels stupid. You might dislike Holst's Planets and consider them a poor man's crass and pompous attempt to
outdo the magnificence of Gustav Mahler — but in the event that you like Planets, you will probably want to close
your eyes and get transported away into space at some moment. This is the
precise thing that an album like Planetarium
needs to do to you, too. But does it?
Honestly speaking, apart from Sufjan's voice
and lyrics, the music reminds me more of the aforementioned Anthony Hegarty.
There are plenty of watery, echoey, glib-shaped, keyboard-based ballads here,
from ʽNeptuneʼ to ʽMercuryʼ, that are about one hundred percent atmosphere and
ultimately depend on whether the singer manages to convert you or not. And then
there are the «loud» numbers like ʽJupiterʼ, electronic workouts with heavy use
of sampling, Artistic Autotune, and overdub-till-you-drop vocal harmonies and
keyboard loops. Both approaches eventually combine on ʽEarthʼ (geocentrism in
action!), a 15-minute piece that begins as a New Age cascade of smooth-'n'-stately
musical winds, then turns into a heavily autotuned prayer, and finally becomes
an alien dance number. Not a single one of these parts, not for a single
moment, ever feels particularly profound or engaging. If this is the best these
guys can come up with to prove the value of ʽEarthʼ to our potentially hostile
neighbours in space, expect to be obliterated upon arrival. At best, this track
is boring; at worst (particularly when those uglified vocals come in), it is excruciating.
I mean, it is not often that a 76-minute long
album passes by in such a way that I cannot latch on to a single second of it —
heck, I even enjoyed parts of Ayreon's epic enterprises, because they were,
well, epic. Corny as hell, sure, but
enjoyable the same way as one enjoys one's Star Trek or Clifford Simak. This
album demands to be taken much more seriously, but how can you take seriously
an album with a ton of autotuned Sufjan Stevens vocals? I can barely take him
seriously when he's clean! And when you
are given clean vocals, other
problems surface. ʽPlutoʼ, for instance, slowly builds upwards from a quiet,
bubbly, kaleidoscopic texture to a loud orchestral waltz, awash in strings and
brass, but the sound is so compressed and flattened that the strings have
absolutely no volume / depth to them, and the whole thing feels fake and
artificial. I understand that they are simply following current trends in
production, while at the same time probably thinking of how innovative this whole
approach is, but these are ugly
trends, and this approach ain't innovative in the slightest.
Since I have no intention of wasting my brains
on trying to explain why each of these tracks sucks on an individual basis, I
will end this with a slightly warped conclusion: Planetarium is like The Age
Of Adz, but with more strings, more Autotune, and more pretense — each of
these three points not working in its
favor. Oh, yes, and a couple of the songs, such as the stripped down, arpeggio-favoring
ʽMercuryʼ, could have fit right in on Carrie
& Lowell, too, but for me this is not a plus, as you already know. But
if you are a Stevens fan, by all means take note, because, despite the
collaborative nature, Planetarium
does feel very much like a bona fide Sufjan Stevens album. I mean, I even have
no idea what exactly is Bruce Dessner's contribution to the record supposed to
be — and I don't even think I want to know.
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