Javelin – Sufjan Stevens ★★★★

Year	Album	Artist	Stars	Score	Genre
2023	Javelin	Sufjan Stevens	★★★★	88	Rock	Indie Folk	Chamber Pop

There’s beauty and innovation in every one of Sufjan Stevens’ releases, but Javelin brings all the best elements of his career together into one package. It has the old-world folk whimsy of his early years without the hokey aspects, the musical complexity of Illinois without the drawn out moments, the grand explorations of Age of Adz without the weird, out of place noises, and touching beauty and lyricism of Carrie & Lowell without the overwhelming sense of dread and despair. It’s him operating at his highest and most refined level. 

Yes, like Carrie & Lowell eight years before it, Javelin is about loss and grief, and the opening “Goodbye Evergreen” is one of the most weighty of the tracks, but the entire album feels and sounds more like a celebration of life and love instead of inescapably dwelling on the past. Maybe it’s because Stevens addresses it through metaphors and imagery about nature — referencing mountains, trees, seasons, animals, the wind and the city — rather than direct personal details. Or maybe it’s the delightful guitar and pleasant strings and electronics that accompany Stevens’ familiar and always captivating vocal performance even during the album’s darkest moments. 

“A Running Start” is a charming and playful start to a relationship. Musically, “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” “Everything That Rises” and “Genuflecting Ghost” are classic guitar-driven Stevens songs with a lovely, quick-picking acoustic guitar with strings and backing vocals. “My Red Little Fox” sounds like a medieval poem. “Shit Talk” is the most ambitious and the most powerful. Multiple sections of repeated lines — “I will always love you,” “Hold me closely, hold me tightly lest I fall” and “I don’t want to fight at all” — carry the song. The ethereal, ascending organ outro maybe is a little too direct a symbol for rising to Heaven after death, but it’s still a beautiful passage. 

It’s such a fully developed record and jam-packed album, it’s kind of amazing it’s only 42 minutes long. Oddly enough, the cover of Neil Young’s “There’s a World” is a perfect closing track that summarizes the album’s themes. “There’s a world you’re living in, no one else has your part. All God’s children in the wind, take it in and blow real hard.”