Cut to the Chase: King of Indie Eccentricity Sufjan Stevens takes a break from his '50 States' project to write a neo-classical composition based on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. It sounds either disgustingly pretentious or a work of complete mad genius - unsurprisingly, it falls somewhere in between the two.
It's hard to make up your mind about Sufjan Stevens sometimes. The Detroit native has always been slightly kooky with his art, whether it's writing albums based on the animals of the Chinese Zodiac, undertaking a project to record an album for each of the fifty American states, or performing whilst wearing a pair of home-made wings.
His newest album is equally as strange. Now a resident of Brooklyn, Stevens was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music to make a visual and aural 'exploration' of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a road that spans the two New York boroughs. Accompanied by an orchestra and a film shot by Stevens himself on Super-8 footage, it premiered in 2007 to resounding success.
In a way, it's pointless to analyse an album like 'The BQE' track-by-track. A 40 minute composition, it takes in elements of neo-classical work (if you're a fan of Nico Muhly or Owen Pallett, you'll like this) without being so off-the-wall as to alienate chinstroking purists.
True, the song titles are utterly pretentious ('Interlude I: Dream Sequence in Subi Circumnavigation'??), but that doesn't detract from the album in the slightest. The vast majority of each movement are elegant, delicate affairs, occasionally stirred by stately brass, or lulled by Peter Pan-like woodwind parps.
The only anomaly as such is the fourth movement 'Traffic Shock', a composition that bursts out of the traps in a flurry of light, sound and colour. It's livened with an electronic buzz and gnarled notes, but still retains enough classical undertones to keep it in harmony with the rest of the album.
It's one of Stevens's most likeable projects to date, and has his quirky nature written all over it. Just one thing, though - what the hell does it have to do with The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway? Perhaps the accompanying visuals will explain everything.
