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Rating: Sufjan Stevens could have been the most influential and considered author of the last twenty or thirty years. He probably has been, and still is, but without a doubt, some of his choices highlight more than his skill as a songwriter and musician, what makes him uniquely ambitious among contemporary authors. This ambition doesn't necessarily mean something negative, but it's something that, in my opinion, poorly hides a certain restlessness and has led him initially to propose recording an album for each of the fifty United States (a project abandoned after 'Michigan: The Great Lake State' and 'Illinoise') and then to embark on experimental projects like 'The Age of Adz', the Sisyphus project (created with Son Lux and Serengeti), and now this album, 'Planetarium', released last June on 4AD and made in collaboration with contemporary classical composer Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner from the National, and drummer James McAlister.
'Planetarium' is an album that might seem difficult to approach due to its nature, which is certainly pretentious, presenting itself as a series of neo-classical and avant-garde music compositions, with each song ideally dedicated and titled after different planets, the Moon, the Sun, and other celestial bodies like Halley's comet, black holes, or the Kuiper Belt. By listening to it repeatedly, however, one can note how substantially this album is more approachable and easier to listen to than it might appear. After all, the variations between individual songs are minimal, and the work configures itself as a sort of unified project divided into different chapters, where synthetic genres and atmospheres find expression, surrounding the songs written and performed melodramatically by Sufjan Stevens and culminating in ambient suggestions in the style of composers like Philip Glass, but also Brian Eno himself, or in sumptuous orchestral arrangements that we might expect to hear as the soundtrack of a peplum film.
Moreover, 'Planetarium' is a work that must be understood in its entirety, where individual episodes probably make no sense if considered separately from each other, in a conceptual proposal that aims to represent something—the solar system and its 'surroundings'—whose elements cannot be taken and analyzed even scientifically in isolation. But far from being a work with scientific content, the album is more like what could be defined as a dramatic work, intending in this sense the birth of the Sun and the planets 5 billion years ago as if this were the most tragic and charged with pathos event that ever occurred. At least within the confines of the Kuiper Belt. But the proposal ultimately, even before finishing this journey within our planetary system, when you are a person who has that ambition natural to every human being and also to those who write songs to push further, becomes one of knowing what awaits us on the other side. So, this work, which clearly originates and revolves around the writing and visions of Sufjan Stevens, has that same elusive character that a moment, a memory, or even the entire existence of a star can have.
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