SUFJAN STEVENS - Songs For Christmas

Is there a more "Christmassy" artist than Sufjan Stevens? Probably not, especially when his focus on religious themes combines with arrangements that, amid sleigh bells and other festive sounds, have often evoked joyous Christmas atmospheres even out of context (see, for instance, the choral parts in the version of "Chicago" included on "Illinois"). It's well known, after all, that ever since he seriously embarked on his artistic career, he has made a habit of putting together, right before the year-end holidays, a mini-album made entirely of songs - original compositions or reworkings of traditional carols - dedicated to Christmas and recorded in an off-the-cuff fashion, over the course of just a few days, with the help of various musicians as well as friends and occasional housemates. Since these mini-albums had almost always remained in a state of semi-clandestinity compared to his official releases, Sufjan decided to pair the 2006 edition of his "Songs For Christmas" with an official reissue of the earlier ones, gathering them all in a hefty box set complete with stickers, sheet music, lyrics, comics and photographs, plus a video and a 42-page booklet containing an original essay by American novelist Rick Moody, as well as two essays and a short story in which Stevens himself tries his hand at writing.

Beyond the admittedly tasty extras, the box set is a great opportunity to retrace the career of an artist who, even in this "themed" guise, never stops impressing with his versatility, and also to try to glimpse his future directions, bearing in mind that the last two volumes of this forty-two-track collection are the only actual output to follow "Illinois".

The initial homespun nature of these mini-albums is evident in the first two volumes, "Noel" and "Hark!", in which you can sense the compositional immediacy inherent to songs made for such an occasion, along with the authentic, genuine, unpretentious atmosphere surrounding radiant little tunes and brief instrumental fragments recorded live with rather basic instrumentation. The first volume, "Noel", after the predictable short intro "Silent Night", is mainly defined by the sound of the banjo, alternating moments of minimal, hushed intimacy ("O Come O Come Emmanuel") and evocative church-like choirs ("Lo How A Rose E'er Blooming") with the joyful drive of "It's Christmas! Let's Be Glad!", a fast-paced track with an old-fashioned flavor. In "Hark!", meanwhile, you can sense distant echoes of the experimental work of "Enjoy Your Rabbit", embodied by the toy piano that marks several tracks, combined with arrangements full of joyfully childlike wonder ("Angels We Have Heard On High", "Put The Lights On The Tree"), or transformed into a kind of post-modern bagpipe on "I Saw Three Ships". However, it's in "Hark!" that the full range of expressive registers for which Stevens is now renowned starts to properly emerge: within just a few songs, he moves effortlessly from the dreamy, bell-laden arrangements of "Put The Lights On The Tree" and "Once In Royal David's City" - ideal soundtracks for any Santa Claus costume - to the soft, light-touch intimacy that wraps "Come Thou Fount Of Every Blessing", and on to the airy, intimate feel of "What Child Is This Anyway?", the only track bearing electric traces, which here and there roughen up the whole before dissolving into a muffled finale, embellished by piano notes.

Already by the following volume, "Ding! Dong!", the custom of collecting Christmas songs starts to lose its original character as a mere divertissement and take on more considered contours, without however losing the immediacy typical of the artist. The eight tracks gathered here alternate the delicate intimacy of the opening piano fragment "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" and the traditional hints of "We Three Kings" with the unbridled polyphony of "Come On! Let's Boogey To The Elf Dance!" and the angelic orchestral sweep of "O Holy Night". There's also a noticeable kinship between the songs collected here and the crystalline singer-songwriter folk of the contemporaneous albums "Michigan" and "Seven Swans", particularly evident in the final two tracks and in the subtle banjo-and-guitar framework that, on "That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!", frames an enchanted description of a Christmas that's anything but stereotypical.

On the fourth mini-album, "Joy", melody takes over: aside from the choruses and the unexpected indie-rock inserts of "Hey Guys! It's Christmas Time!", the remaining tracks are all very linear, held up by slender, delicate harmonic structures that soberly tackle the less rhetorical sides of Christmas. Once again, Sufjan Stevens, setting aside for a moment his penchant for extravagant sonic grandiosity, manages to express himself superbly through the simplicity of tracks built on little more than voice and guitar - joined only by a handful of other "Christmassy" elements - inspired both by religious subjects ("Away In A Manger", the instrumental "The Incarnation") and by the gentle, universal reflections of "Joy To The World" and the personal ones of "Did I Make You Cry On Christmas Day? (Well, You Deserved It!)", whose soft introspection beautifully captures the subtle sadness inevitably lurking beneath the holiday season.

The final volume, recorded last June, is the most substantial of the eleven-track set, and probably the most significant in terms of Stevens' current artistic moment, as he still refuses to give up the element of surprise and the constant reshaping of his mode of expression. Beyond three brief piano interludes - among them a thirty-six-second fragment of the ultra-classic "Jingle Bells" - "Peace" stands out from the previous mini-albums for the richness and complexity of its sounds. After the placid instrumental "Once in Royal David's City", in fact, "Get Behind Me, Santa!" brings forth a bizarre orchestral quality that, amid lopsided little organs, horns and quirks of homespun retro-futurism with a vaguely psychedelic effect, recurs across more than one track ("Christmas In July", "Jupiter Winter", "Star Of Wonder"), eventually fading into the oblique, final stretching-out of "The Winter Solstice". Here too there's no shortage of composed intimacy, hovering over the piano of the serene "Holy, Holy, Holy" and the first part of "Sister Winter", whose string arrangement nonetheless builds into a restrained crescendo marked by electric touches, horns and a fair variety of other effects. There's no guarantee that these tracks offer useful clues for defining the sensibility of post-"Illinois" Sufjan Stevens, yet they do seem to hint at the beginnings of yet another evolution (or simply an experiment - only time will tell) that, without ever losing sight of the artist's core coordinates, feeds his more markedly orchestral side, while also steering his multi-instrumentalist leanings toward a recovery of analog, liquid, and rather disorienting sonorities.

Taken as a whole, the lavish box set "Songs For Christmas" turns out to be something more than a collection for die-hard fans or a way of keeping the artist's presence alive between one record and the next. Sure, added to the outtakes album "The Avalanche", the material gathered here brings the total to over sixty tracks released in a year without an actual proper album, and yet an artist of Sufjan Stevens' caliber manages to ward off any suspicion of purely commercial intent behind such an operation by nothing other than his usual skill at reworking, with disarming skill and simplicity, a wide range of styles and expressions, coming across as equally credible in all of them. What's more, the Christmas theme itself, admittedly rather limiting, is developed in a far from banal way, without easy surrender to the saccharine rhetoric of "good feelings" and induced, artificial happiness; if anything, among the most expressive tracks are precisely the more reflective ones, and those that, with a mix of delicacy and irony, tell the other side of Christmas.

Among the typical seasonal treats, "Songs For Christmas" can hold a place of real distinction, providing fitting accompaniment to the festive break with its bittersweet flavor, lighthearted but not overly so, and above all with its sheer, outsized scale - which hides only the risk of overindulgence, one that Sufjan Stevens is well aware he's running with such a large and closely packed body of work.

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20/12/2006