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Album Details

• Artist: Sufjan Stevens
• Album: The Avalanche: Outtakes And Extras From The Illinois Sessions
• Label: Asthmatic Kitty
• Year of Release: 2006
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: patchen on 2006-08-30

Strong collection of leftovers from a projected longer version of the recent Illinois, yet we're getting to the point where even Sufjan Stevens' outtakes are gold. His running history of America is already classic, his eye for news making his songs micro and macro at the same time, like small myths. This 21song set also explores the creative process, and is peopled with writers, dreamers, and unknown in their lifetime artists who also have struggled to find the right angle to approach and explain personal vision. This theme is best advanced in "Adlai Stevenson" and "The Vivian Girls Are Visited In The Night by Saint Dargarius and his Squadron of Benevolent Butterflies." Oddly, the connection between the failed politician who was perhaps too honest for American tastes, and the artist who filled his lonely life with the construction of his own elaborate fantasy world is easy to make. Both are examples of dreamers who carried on even in the face of ridicule and misunderstanding. Likewise, "The Mistress Witch from McClure (or, The Mind That Knows Itself)" and "For Clyde Tombaugh Chicago (Multiple Personality Version)" manage to life the small details of certain lives and hold them up as part of our own struggle. If anything, this is better than Illinois; it certainly more deeply explores the ideas raised on that record, and delivers them with quiet, joyful power.

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