Death with dignity (Sufjan Stevens) (LP 3976)

Sufjan Stevens  Carrie & Lowell  (Vinyl, Asthmatic Kitty Records, 2015) *****  

Genre: Folk rock 

Places I remember: Real Groovy Records

Fab, and all the other pimply hyperboles: Should Have Known Better

Gear costume: Death With Dignity 

They loom large in his legend (The Album Collection playlists): Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6

Active compensatory factors: I have listened to quite a few of Sufjan's albums on Spotify but the only one I've felt driven to own a physical copy of is Carrie & Lowell. 

It's a quite extraordinary album - deeply personal. It resonates with me (my own mother passed away while I was in my mid-twenties and I still mourn her passing). The songs on this album haunt me. And somehow - entertain me. Extraordinary.

The sparseness of the sound is a key ingredient to my on-going enjoyment of Carrie & Lowell. For those unaware - lyrically, he uses the album to examine the psychological results from the 2012 death of his mother Carrie, and his relationship with Carrie's second husband Lowell Brams.

The AllMusic review sums up the album beautifully: 

While there's deep and genuine love in Carrie & Lowell, there's also uncertainty, sadness, and brief but jagged bursts of anger; these songs speak of loss and heartache and the difficult push and pull of familial relationships, but they're also full of random memories, both pleasant and troubling, and they leap from reveries of family vacations faded by the passing of decades, to the immediate regrets of what was or wasn't said and done in the aftermath of death. Carrie & Lowell is about memory as much as mourning, and Stevens has drawn these songs in a purposefully elegant manner, with his introspection accompanied by beautiful but homespun melodies, and the arrangements and production only magnifying their dreamlike, whisper-quiet drift that strikes with an emotional force that a louder, more violent approach could not achieve. Carrie & Lowell is a heartfelt expression of love that is devoid of the slightest hint of sentimentality, and with these songs, Stevens strips his emotions bare and allows us all to be the audience for his anger, shame, and sense of loss as he pages through his memories of his family.

Where do they all belong? An album that I keep returning to. It's a helpfully cathartic exercise for me, and countless others.