I'm sure that many of you already know the deal with Sufjan Stevens by now. He's an indie folk wizard, a multi-layered, multi-faceted, multi-instrumentalist, multi-everything. He set out to make albums dedicated to each of the 50 States. And his latest entry in that venture, an album dedicated to Illinois, won a lot of rave reviews, including the top spot for the year 2005 on such critically trusted sites as Pitchfork Media and MetaCritic. If you were into intelligent music in 2005 and your primary method of finding it was via the Internet, then you likely at least heard of Sufjan and his wonderful array of stringed instruments and horns and bells and woodwinds and ridiculously long song titles that take longer to say out loud than it does to listen to the actual song. And if you bought into the massive hype (which the man's work justified, even if it's still hype and that can always carry backlash later on), you were probably wondering when the guy's golden pen was finally going to run out of ink. When would this method of drawing us into little vignettes of random lives from different US States while piling on layers of baroque instrumentation get old? When would it stop feeling original and start feeling like he was following his own complex paint-by-numbers pattern? For some, the answers to those questions came about a year later - the summer of 2006, when Sufjan released a companion album entitled The Avalanche: Outtakes and Extras from the Illinois Album.

To best put oneself in the right frame of mind to approach The Avalanche, I find it helpful to think of the Deleted/Alternate Scenes feature on a DVD. Let's say you've rented a little-known movie that turned out to be really awesome, and after watching it, you clicked over to the Special Features section to learn more about the creative process behind the film. In this section you're able to see how the film concept evolved from early drafts to what was finally edited together, polished off, and then released. You're able to watch scenes that were cut from the movie, for reasons having to do with time, budget, redundancy, or inconsistency. There might also be alternate takes of certain scenes, as the actors and director were experimenting with different tones. And some of it might truly have been worth throwing away, but seeing it helps you to appreciate the decision they made to not keep it in the final draft. Other scenes might be wonderfully performed and totally memorable in their own right, but may not have matched the overall flow of the film. All in all, those bonus features aren't just a bunch of random junk, even if some of it is junk. It's extra insight to satiate the curiosity of hardcore fans.

Now here's where this analogy between DVD Bonus Features and The Avalanche breaks down. You didn't have to pay full price for a whole other DVD that is sold separately, as if it were its own movie (perhaps you paid some extra bucks for a Special Edition, but you didn't buy two completely separate discs at equal prices). The Avalanche is being sold as a stand-alone album, and despite marketing and a cover photo that makes it pretty clear that this is a collection of B-sides and outtakes, some have engaged it and rated it as a standalone Sufjan Stevens album. I suppose it's only fair if you had to pay $15 for it. It's not a disc that is as easy to listen to all the way through in one sitting as I find the Illinois and Michigan albums to be. Quite honestly, there are a lot of great ideas packaged within that start off with noteworthy historical figures or interesting fictional characters or situations set in real cities and towns in the Land of Lincoln, but don't seem to get much of anywhere beyond the snippets of observation patched together. The personal, more engaging material was, for the most part, wisely chosen to appear on Illinois. What we have here still amounts to what I think is a respectable collection of songs and a lot of unnecessary interludes. It's a disc that'll certainly make you glad Illinois didn't end up a double album as originally planned. But listen carefully, and among the flotsam and jetsam I think you'll find a handful of songs that stand among Sufjan's best, and some other stuff that is still more interesting than most artists' B-sides are. It may be well past time for him to move onto another state (or another thematic motif altogether if he really did intend the 50 States thing as a joke), but if we have to still hear about Illinois, at least we're still hearing about it with music that tickles our ears and lyrics that make us scratch our heads in the unique way that only Sufjan can.

The Avalanche
I took a train from Virginia
To Illinois, my home
He said "I knew you had it in ya"
A mind to make its own...
Things start off in a gentle but promising way, with piano, banjo, and acoustic guitar brushing by in the open, calm verses, and the persistent honking of flutes and horns in what I suppose is the song's chorus. The song is ostensibly about a car, the Chevrolet Avalanche, instead of an actual avalanche, but like many stories on this disc, it's told in less of a coherent nature than the ones on Illinois, so I can't make heads or tails of it. I love the layering of musical elements here, particularly when the flutes go all a-flutter like they did in the pair of short tracks that opened Illinois. But the incessant "Come on, hands! Come on feet!", etc. provided by the exuberant background vocals gets a bit annoying as it builds in intensity toward the end of this short song.

Dear Mr. Supercomputer
Oh my God, I can't believe it
What went wrong? The human race, in its place
In religion, superstition
Man's conditioned, mysterious, incomplete...
This is a brilliant piece, inspired by the Supercomputer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It marries Sufjan's now-familiar array of flutes, horns and bells to an electronic undercurrent, bringing back ever-so-slight memories of his experimental album Enjoy Your Rabbit. The rhythm of most of the song is 7/8, which is counted off in a fastidious manner (at one point the background vocals even assert, "One two three four five six seven, all computers go to heaven"), as if to mimic the precise number-crunching of a computer which has seemingly grown into an overbearing monster. The song seems to tackle questions of technology and whether our dependence on it has caused us to lose focus on our humanity and our need for emotion, relationships, religious faith, etc. I love how most of the song has an organic feel, especially with the lively, rolling drums, and yet the image of that imposing, lightning-fast computer is never lost amidst all of the human-generated sounds. This is one of Sufjan's finest songs, and I do think that this one should have earned itself a spot on Illinois.

Adlai Stevenson
1952, the heart was not your master
The accident you knew would carry with your laughter...
The first historical figure from Illinois to get a track dedicated to him on The Avalanche is Adlai Stevenson, a former governor of Illinois who was apparently soundly beaten when he ran for President against Eisenhower. This song offers little more than fragments of thoughts about this man and his work within the state and with the United Nations (the chorus states, "Adlai, Adlai, what did you say, and what is the answer?", which sounds so vague that it could be about anybody if the man hadn't been explicitly named), so it's up to the music to really make this two-and-a-half-minute piece worthwhile, which thankfully it does. The horns are a strong presence here, blurting out their quick little fanfare over rolling drums and crashing cymbals that sound like they were lifted from a town's centennial parade. The banjo is, of course, plucking around in there too. It's a fun piece to listen to even if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense without going and reading the Wikipedia entry on Adlai Stevenson.

The Vivian Girls Are Visited in the Night by Saint Dargarius and His Squadron of Benevolent Butterflies
This is a trembling, watery interlude, with a gently flowing acoustic undercurrent and soft bells that remind me of Michigan's interludes themed after bodies of water. Unfortunately, there's also an irritating wobbling noise, like a ghostly radio signal, that begins to overtake the song, and the music finally dissolves into the electric buzzing of what sounds like a poorly hooked-up speaker. At 1:49, this instrumental piece is way too long.

Chicago (Acoustic Version)
This first of three alternate takes of "Chicago" maintains the same chords but completely abandons the busy rhythm of the original, opting to gently pick out the chords on an acoustic guitar. This is quite lovely, as are Sufjan's sweet "ooh"s which serve as the background vocals, slowly building up in layers to create a quieter ode to Illinois' largest city. Unfortunately, the song never feels like it fully picks up, so it doesn't really justify its length (even if that length is somewhat cut down from that of the original).

The Henney Buggy Band
Let the bugles play
The sermon on the raid
I kissed you on the face
I kissed you on the playground...
Lyrically, there's a lot more going on in this fun, punchy little song, another horn-dominated piece which feels a lot like Adlai Stevenson's caffienated younger brother. The drums click-clack along exuberantly, Sufjan's thin voice signs of strange things such as marching in bands and kissing someone on the playground, and the Ronald Reagan Tollway, and it seems like this one could take years to unravel. For those who don't want to put in the effort (and I don't blame you since these were the songs that were rejected because they didn't fit the overall theme of Illinois as well), there's still plenty to enjoy, what with the cute little "diving" flute riffs, Sufjan's occasional lapses into falsetto, and that persistent, peppy horn melody that just won't quit.

Saul Bellow
And my good friends
With their eyes on what it takes
I could kiss them
But the reelings make mistakes...
Now we're out in sparser territory - think one of Michigan's lonelier tracks like "Romulus" or "Oh God, Where Are You Now?", or most of the material on Seven Swans, but with the contribution of a lovely wooden flute here and there. This one seems a tad slow and repetitive, and once again we've got the problem of naming a song after a historical figure without rally saying much about that person. We mostly get the chorus repeated far too many times: "Getting solid walls, with the know-it-alls, get in trouble with Saul Bellow." Near the end of the song, Sufjan's trademark "nervous" fingering on the electric guitar threatens to take over and drive us over the edge into rhythm-less freak-out land, but thankfully the song ends and we're spared the torture. (Oh, just you wait.)

Carlyle Lake
Oh, stop thinking of tomorrow
Don't stop thinking of today
You're not getting any younger
You've got nothing to explain...
This song about a man-made lake feels an awful lot like the "Henney Buggy Band", just with the horns scaled back a bit and more banjo plucking to help drive the rhythm. The trademark "exuberant chorus of rag-tag voices" that we've come to know and love on Sufjan's albums sings pretty much the whole song, to the point where Sufjan's voice is sometimes difficult to pick out. What the lyrics, which have to do with seizing the day and making the most of your life in the present, have to do with a man-made lake other than the tossed-off mention of it, is beyond me. The song kind of collapses into a weird instrumental warm-up session near the end, as if the various players involved didn't know when to stop jamming.

Springfield, or Bobby Got a Shadfly in His Hair
If my father took his life for the national plan, I don't care
I'm not about to stick my grave with an apron and a bucket of plans, never ever...
I guess there had to be a song about the state's capital in there somewhere (hmm, I wonder if there was a song about Lansing that got cut from Michigan). This slow, measured piece is picked out by electric guitar and banjo, with the guitars doing an occasional edgy freak-out following the refrain section of the song. It's a little too improvisational and off-key for my tastes (think the ending of "The Upper Peninsula"), but whatever. The lyrics seem to tell the story of a strange affair, in which a young man is found to be in way over his head as a woman tries to seduce him, and then his wife apparently comes after the two of them on a bicycle, with a knife in her hand. No, seriously, that's pretty much exactly what he says. What this has to do with getting a shadfly caught in your hair, I don't know, but I guess Sufjan either made up a euphemism or simply borrowed an out-of-date one. Either that or I'm missing the analogy. It happens a lot on this album. The song ends in a slight mess of wandering electronic tones and guitar notes that doesn't really need to be there.

The Mistress Witch from McClure (or, The Mind that Knows Itself)
And the winter moves about Illinois
When my sister picks a fight with the Alexander boy
And my father locks the car by the store
Still we figure out the keys, and follow him once more...
This song is another gentle, banjo-driven tune with a pace similar to "Casimir Pulaski Day", and a horn-drenched refrain to further solidify that comparison. It's actually the first in a trilogy of songs about different kinds of "selves", which I'm sure are literary references that I'm just not catching. This one seems to concern a childhood encounter with a witch-like woman in the dead of winter (which reminds me of the movie Big Fish, fittingly enough), and from this the observation is gleaned, "The mind that knows itself has a mind to kill the other." It's all Greek to me.

Kaskaskia River
Along comes wobbling interlude number 2. It's kind of a cross between previous interlude "The Vivian Girls" and the tacked-on outro to "Springfield" - more trembling strumming and plucking of one banjo chord and nervous guitar notes that hover around it. It's pretty for the first 30 seconds or so, then it gets old fast.

Chicago (Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version)
This one takes the acoustic concept explored in the first alternate take, and basically replays that idea with soft bells, keyboards, and gentle, rolling drums. The results are about equally lovely, but again we have the same problem with how long the song drags out, which is more of an issue since this version is six minutes long. The melody of the song is indelible and lends itself well to these "remixes", and this particular version makes me think of a peaceful downtown stroll on a street bustling with shoppers at Christmastime in the 1950's. If you're gonna label something "Adult Contemporary", then I guess this isn't a bad way to go about it, since the stately horn solo and the chiming bells help to ensure that the peaceful atmosphere isn't an altogether boring one, even if it does get repetitive. It is interesting to note that there are background vocals here which don't seem to be present in the original version, so lyrics have actually been added to the song, even if I can't make out enough of those lyrics to tell you whether they add any value.

Inaugural Pop Music for Jane Margaret Byrne
This warm piece comprised of electronic keyboards, drums, and electric guitar works nicely as an instrumental outro to the preceding version of "Chicago", and it's dedicated to the town's first female mayor. Nothing terribly special here, and the music might even strike some as cheesy, but I do enjoy the "swarm of flutes" that takes over as the song fades out.

No Man's Land
And when I make up my mind
I change it all the time
I take it back, I take it back...
Another sure-fire winner shows up here in the form on one of Sufjan's catchiest, but also most rhythmically tricky, compositions. The verses seem to come in these little pulses of three, but there's this cute little flute fill in between each iteration of the primary melody, which totally throws me off the trail when I'm trying to figure out the time signature. Further confusing things are the handclaps in 2/4 which are overlaid upon this melody at times. All of Sufjan's favorite instruments (except for maybe the banjo, which I'm not hearing in this one) are fulfilling their duties wonderfully, as he tells a tale that only makes sense in his head. Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" is clearly referenced, but Sufjan seems to be saying that the land belongs to no one, and then there's some business about a car being in the lake and a boat that swept and swayed. It sounds great when sung, but as usual, don't expect to make much sense of it. This tune actually made its appearance (along with a brief snippet of the Illinois version "Chicago") in the Oscar-nominated film Little Miss Sunshine, so I guess Sufjan now has a shot at appearing on an Academy-Award winning film's soundtrack, which is kind of cool.

The Palm Sunday Tornado Hits Crystal Lake
Here we go again. An ominous piano foreshadows the approach of a musical storm, with little bits of guitar and horns and whatnot being whipped about by the relentless winds. Actually, he does a pretty good job of giving us the aural image of a tornado, so I can't be too hard on him for the lack of listen ability here, even if it's really just another version of the same old "trembling" interlude that he keeps throwing at us.

The Pick-Up
Abraham is alive and well, in the pick-up
And his wife casts no more spells, in the pick-up...
If a song about riding in the backseat of a vehicle and kissing family members, played in 3/4 time, with bells and flutes flapping about like hummingbirds, seems familiar to you, that's because we've heard this idea before, played out in a much fuller and more gorgeous fashion in the song "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!" on Illinois. That song didn't have truncated lyrics to make way for a wordless chorus of "Ah"s or end in yet another jumbled musical freakout, either.

The Perpetual Self, or What Would Saul Alinsky Do?
Everything is lost, uh-oh
But I know that you can take it to the Lord
Everything you are, uh-oh
Isn't all that you can gather for yourself...
This one feels like a rushed reprise of the drumbeat from the original "Chicago" and the crunchy guitar riffing of "The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts". It's a fairly straightforward endorsement of giving one's problems over to the Lord and just enjoying the freedom of not needing to be in total control of one's life. It's fun, but fails to really stick in my memory because it's so brief and so similar to other songs.

For Clyde Tombaugh
Yet another variant on that same old interlude idea - I'll admit to being slightly attached to this one because I work on websites having to do with space exploration, and this instrumental piece is dedicated to the discoverer of Pluto. The alien keyboard sounds do recreate the curious, excited feeling of discovering some strange, distant object in space with your telescope and having no clue what it is. But I really didn't need three minutes of this spacey weirdness to get the point across.

Chicago (Multiple Personality Disorder Version)
Sufjan's obviously not hiding the fact that these versions of "Chicago" are getting rather ridiculous by this point - I'm pretty sure this one was just done for fun, and it's not a serious attempt to find the right voice for this song. This one pulls in quirky elements from other Sufjan songs - the organs at the beginning sound an awful lot like "Sleeping Bear, Sault Saint Marie", the handclaps are present in a few of the upbeat songs on Illinois and earlier on this album, and the vocals are electronically tweaked to sound ever-so-slightly off-key while a chorus of trumpets that sounds like it was stolen from a mariachi band provides a beautiful refrain. Those spacey keyboard sounds from the previous track even make a brief appearance. It's like the leftover sandwich of Sufjan Stevens songs - just take whatever ingredients you find in the fridge and throw them between to slices of bread, and BAM, instant midnight snack. It's actually the most enjoyable of the "remixes", just due to how wacky and stressed out it is. It has another one of those "take your time to trail off into noisy nothingness" endings that I despise, but oh well, nobody's perfect.

Pittsfield
You can work late till midnight, we don't care
We can fix our own meals, we can wash our own hair...
This is quite possibly the most infuriating example of a good song idea gone wrong to be found on The Avalanche. Sufjan gives us a rather poignant tug at the heartstrings with a sad story about a defiant child - the musical mood feels a lot like "The Pick-Up", but there are no holes to be found in the lyrics, no evidence of laziness in the songwriting department. It's interesting, because the song is about a lazy, somewhat nihilistic child, rebelling against workaholic parents who leave him home alone with the TV as a babysitter and bark orders at him that he flippantly ignores. The story's told from the child's point of view, and the sparse instrumentation (somewhat of a blend between the achingly gorgeous "Holland" and the more plainspoken "Romulus") leaves plenty of room for the words to really sting. As things pick up during the chorus and background vocals begin to sympathize with the child's plight, Sufjan's timid voice seems to be hiding back tears as those last words hit us - "I'm not afraid of you any more". This builds into a beautiful crescendo of "da da da da"s and crashing cymbals and one last horn fanfare - and then Sufjan deliberately and completely sabotages the end of the song with the scratchy, atonal, vomitous, utterly aurally offensive "guitar freakout", just because we haven't heard enough of those already. Solemn piano notes at the end try to bring a little bit of resolve, but it doesn't succeed in the way that the final sad chord at the end of "The Upper Peninsula" did. It just takes a great song and nearly flushes it down the toilet.

The Undivided Self (For Eppie and Popo)
And now we have to listen to more random bells and spacey noises and Sufjan gently "aah"-ing and "ooh"-ing with no semblance of rhythm for FIVE FREAKING MINUTES. I thought that the final track on Illinois was rather useless and under whelming, but I came to enjoy it after a while, but this one is truly indulgent and unsalvageable.

Big sigh of relief... we're finally at the end of this monstrosity. It's actually not band, for a collection of rejects from a far superior album - as I've listened more carefully, I've discovered more redeeming value to a lot of these songs than I had originally noticed. But I'd still advise new Sufjan fans to proceed with caution - definitely digest Illinois, Michigan, and Seven Swans before attempting to get into The Avalanche. Ultimately, I think it'll be worth most of the money you paid for it, even at full price, but prior appreciation of Sufjan's work is definitely what makes it less likely that you'll regret spending your money on this disc. It might be more worth your while to download the "full songs" on the album, not counting the "Chicago" mixes (which are fun, but don't have the replay value of the original), on iTunes or something like that, and waiting for Sufjan to put out another (hopefully state-themed!) album that is intentionally crafted to be a cohesive whole, because that's when he's generally found to be firing on all cylinders.

Hey, at least we know that the editorial process used to pare Illinois down to a single disc was wisely carried out. That's reassuring.

ALBUM WORTH:
The Avalanche $1
Dear Mr. Supercomputer $2
Adlai Stevenson $1.50
The Vivian Girls Are Visited in the Night... -$.50
Chicago (Acoustic Version) $1
The Henney Buggy Band $1.50
Saul Bellow $.50
Carlyle Lake $1
Springfield, or Bobby Got a Shadfly in His Hair $.50
The Mistress Witch from McClure (or, The Mind that Knows Itself) $1
Kaskaskia River $0
Chicago (Adult Contemporary Easy Listening Version) $1
Inaugural Pop Music for Jane Margaret Byrne $.50
No Man's Land $2
The Palm Sunday Tornado Hits Crystal Lake $.50
The Pick-Up $.50
The Perpetual Self, or What Would Saul Alinsky Do? $.50
For Clyde Tombaugh $0
Chicago (Multiple Personality Disorder Version) $1.50
Pittsfield $1
The Undivided Self (For Eppie and Popo) -$.50
TOTAL: $17

Website: http://www.sufjanstevens.com

Recommended: Yes

Great Music to Play While: Listening