There is something horribly, horribly strange about Sufjan Stevens's latest album. I literally cannot listen to his last album (Age of Adz) for this reason... it shreds my heart, and not in a good way, really; in a mystical, terrifying, relentless, strange.
It makes me feel the way I remember feeling when, as a child, I found myself fixated on strange and bizarre images while lying awake in my bed (a mangled tree stump, a spindle of glowing silver thread, a sarcophagus that bridged a river), and would come sheepishly downstairs to sit with my parents half panicked, half consumed with melancholy, half afraid the universe would swallow us up without warning or mercy (yes, that's three halves).
After I sobbed for three hours one night last year while listening to "Futile Devices" on repeat, I knew it had to stop. This music is not right. It is strange.
This new 58-track album of "Christmas" music is everything that terrifies me about this universe. I cannot endorse its consumption. I think it is the songs of terrible angels, or of ancients, or of aliens.
