REVIEW: Sufjan Stevens "A Sun Came"

Rating: 4

Remember back in high school when you used to sit in class tuning out whatever the teacher was saying so you could scribble profound thoughts and heart-attack-urgent notes in your binder.  How you felt yourself absorbing everything the world had to offer and that possibilities were endless and that everything was both so important and yet so meaningless...  That binder was where you figured things out.  You probably even wrote a poem there.

This is that, except a whole album of it and better than what you're imagining right now.  Sun is a 2nd edition of Stevens' Asthmatic Kitty debut and may serve best to document where he started rather than as a tethering point for his current, more evolved and focused sound.  I'm grading on a curve so this doesn't stand up well to "Seven Swans" or "Michigan" each of which benefits from a parsing of instruments and trimming of sets.  But it's interesting to hear the eclectic mix of influences Stevens wears on his sleeve  - Asian strings and rhythms, found-sound samples, bluegrass banjo, and medieval vocal harmonies.  Disappointing work from an "A" student, but still more interesting than fifth period physics.