Album Club 2024 Review: #1 Javelin
In which we discuss last week's album of the week, and preview this week's choice.
Hello Friends! Here we go then - our first debrief of Album Club 2024, in which we unpack our thoughts on listening to Sufjan Stevens’s latest album Javelin. Before we dive in, a quick reminder to those of you who were maybe still away from emails last week - for the New Year, we’re rebooting our OneTrackMinds Album Club - each week, we select a different album, and try to listen to it all the way through at least three times, sharing our comments, thoughts and reactions on Substack’s Chat Threads, Notes and via this email. If you want to join in, just find the album of the week on your music streaming service of choice, try to listen to the album all the way through at least three times over the course of the week, and let us know what you think.
Right then, without further ado, what did we think of Javelin?
Before: Now, on paper, you’d think I’d be a fully-paid up Sufjan Stevens fan, but the truth is, despite being very aware of him, I don’t think I’d ever really listened to his music before. For instance, I don’t think I could tell you the name of any of his songs. Oh, apart from that one he wrote for the soundtrack of Call Me By Your Name, but, now that I think about it, I don’t actually know it’s name… Hang on a second...
Here it is. It’s called “Mystery of Love”.
But, despite him ticking all the indie-troubadour boxes that have, historically, floated my musical boat, he and his work had somehow passed me by. I was aware of him, sure, but I’d never knowingly listened to his music. Whether this is because his music didn’t get much airplay on the radio when I was at my most musically curious, (which I can’t even verify as a fact), or because there was something a little too obviously whimsical and kooky about him that I found off-putting. He is, after all, an artist who unveiled a plan to write an album worth of songs for all fifty United States of America, but gave up after releasing just two - Michigan and (Come On And Feel the) Illinois(e) - and, having never visited either Michigan or Illinois at the time of release, I didn’t feel particularly tempted to part with my all-too-scarce record-buying money, despite the very good reviews1.
Also - and I’m a little embarrassed to admit to this - but there is something a little too earnest, a little too pious, a little too devotional, a little too ‘Christian Rock’ about some of the tracks of his that I’d heard. That’s an unconscious bias right there. Or perhaps it’s a conscious one. But either way, there was something about Stevens that made me feel a bit like his music wasn’t really for me.
But I’d always been curious. That Call Me By Your Name song is glorious (although it has to be noted that listening to it while watching Timothée Chalamet stare tearfully into a fireplace obviously helps it make the sort of shot-to-the-heart emotional connection that stays with you). So when Javelin was released to some pretty terrific reviews towards the end of last year, I thought I’d give it a listen. Plus, the intriguing discovery that he’d written and recorded much of the record while recovering from a pretty horrible-sounding auto-immune disease called Guillain-Barré syndrome gave the whole thing an extra layer of interest for someone - like me - who is interested in the life-changing power of music. So…
During:… I dived in on New Year’s Day, shortly after sending out last week’s newsletter. I put my headphones on, lay down on my couch and promptly fell asleep. On first listen, the record almost entirely passed me by. It was perfectly nice - I managed to sleep through it after all, despite several of the tracks veering rather drastically into erratic noise after a slow and gentle start. But I couldn’t really remember any of the songs after that first listen. None of them stood out, except perhaps the album closer, “There’s A World”, of which more in a moment…
A couple of days later, I listened to it again, this time while negotiating traffic on the M25 on a journey out to see my parents. Now, the M25 is far from the most conducive environment in which to appreciate anything, other than, perhaps, the automobile’s unique capacity to raise one’s blood pressure and instil a sense of hatred and disgust towards one’s fellow man. And so it proved.
There are of course, some songs that sound better when belted out of a car stereo, as helpfully demonstrated by the kind of faintly embarrassing TV ads like this one from the first golden age of the CD…
It’s fair to say that none of Sufjan Stevens work would ever appear on such a compilation. Let it be said that his music does not hold up well to being played in a noisy car. His voice - whispery and wan at the best of times - is drowned out by the bassy-thrum of the wheels on tarmac. The delicate and skilled instrumentation lost against the muddy noise of the traffic whizzing past me. As such, my second listen to Javelin was a deeply frustrating one, and I’m afraid I got quite fed up with it. My prior bias about Stevens being almost embarrassingly twee - the sort of music that Alan McGee once described as ‘bed-wetter music’ - felt all too accurate. For instance, one of the songs on Javelin is called “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?”. I mean, honestly. Will anybody ever love you? Not if you carry on like that, you whiny sod…
So listen two was not a success. But I accept that the environment in which I listened to it was not really a fair canvas on which to judge it. So the next day, I decided to give it another go. And this time, the magic happened…
I put it on in my office, listening to it on my headphones, with my wife and daughters out of the house and, blissfully, with no pressing deadlines to distract me. And what I discovered was a very lovely album indeed. When listening to it properly, it’s clear that “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?” is a much more tongue-in-cheek proposition than my M25 listen suggested - the sort of faux-self-pitying thing Morrissey used to write back when it was okay to like him. Having found his whispery delivery to be somewhat irksome in the car, I now discovered it to have a delightful affinity with perhaps my all-time favourite folky troubadour, Elliott Smith. Indeed, “My Little Red Fox”, even shares the same waltz-like time signature as some of Elliott Smith’s most delightful songs (Waltz #1 and Waltz #2 most obviously)…
On my fourth listen, while lunch was cooking yesterday, I found myself really engaging with it. It’s a record that builds - getting more complex and more sophisticated as it goes on, culminating (before a delightful coda, to be discussed shortly) in the epic eight minute and thirty-one second track “Shit Talk” (which, quaintly has an ‘E’ for explicit content label on Apple Music), and which moves and grows and swerves and evolves throughout its lengthy running time.
The album finishes with a song called “There’s A World”, which, as I mentioned above, was the song that most obviously stood out to me on my first listen. It was only when reading some of the reviews ahead of writing up this debrief that I discovered that it’s a cover of a Neil Young2 track from his album Harvest - an album I’d most certainly listened to many times before. It’s fair to say it’s a very loose cover, so I can forgive myself for not recognising it. It’s also - and yes, this is a subjective take here - a much better version than the Neil Young song, and a candidate for my growing list of all-time great cover versions…
After: So what did I make of my journey with Javelin. Well, to a great degree, I don’t know if that’s what Album Club is really about. I’m not so interested in whether or not an album is ‘good’ or not - more about the way in which the focused effort to listen to music can affect one’s appreciation of it. That certainly happened last week - and would have done whether or not I committed the sacrilege of trying to assess an album’s quality by listening to it while driving on the motorway. Javelin definitely changed as I listened to it, and I changed as I listened to it too. This morning while I was making toast, I found myself humming the tune of Will Anybody Ever Love Me? And that’s something I didn’t expect to happen. I now know the names of several Sufjan Stevens songs, and I dare say I’ll be seeking out some more…
Favourite Comments From You: Ian found it ‘quite soothing for the soul’ on first listen, while P J reckoned ‘Every song sounds like it would be on the soundtrack to (Cameron Crowe movie) Elizabethtown”.
Total Listens: Four
Favourite Tracks: Will Anybody Ever Love Me?, My Little Red Fox, There’s A World.
Further Listening: Stevens’s 2015 album Carrie & Lowell is his most highly-rated record on Pitchfork, and is purportedly full of the sort of intricate and emotionally charged songwriting that makes Javelin such a success. And then there’s that mad-sounding Illinois record to check out too…
THIS WEEK’S RECORD
… is Peter Gabriel’s third self-titled album, also known as Melt.
The last record I bought last year was Peter Gabriel’s excellent new record I/O (the Dark Side mix, in case any of you care), and I enjoyed it a great deal. But I’ve never really ‘got’ Peter Gabriel if I’m honest. I’ve always found there to be something slightly naff about the odd, 80s-style production on many of his songs. This is no one’s fault but my own, and I’m going to spend this week trying to rectify it, but listening - at least three times, all the way through - to what is often referred to as his masterpiece. I hope you’ll join me!
Listen on Spotify or Apple Music.
We’ll be back on Friday for our regular OneTrackMinds newsletter. It would be remiss of me not to mention our upcoming shows at Wilton's Music Hall on January 18th and 19th, as well as those on February 2nd and 3rd (including our first ever Saturday Matinee!). We’ve got an amazing line-up of guests for all five shows, and I urge you to book your tickets if you haven’t done so already. You can get the best tickets in the house for just £11 each if you use the discount code OTMCrew when booking.
Until then…
KB.
There was something about the fact that the Illinois album was 1 hour and 31 minutes long, and featured 26 tracks that made me suspicious. Surely 26 tracks on one album was too many tracks? I’d been burned before, having bought an album (which, annoyingly, I now can’t find the name of) by Floridian Ska-Punk pillocks Less Than Jake, which had a huge number of tracks on and which was, mostly, terrible. It put me off buying albums that I deemed excessively long for ages, which is why it took me until 2017 to finally discover the glorious joys of The Magnetic Fields’s peerless 69 Love Songs…
Neil Young, coincidentally, is another folky-singer-songwriter who I feel like I should like more than I do, but whose work has somehow passed me by. It’s a lot to do with his voice, which I find to be incredibly irritating and almost impossible to take seriously. Maybe we’ll give one of his records a listen on a future Album Club…