Sufjan Stevens

★★★ The Ascension ASTHMATIC KITTY. CD/DL/LP Uneasy listening for 2020, on Stevens’ eighth album. There was never going to be a Carrie &

Lowell Part 2, given the personal cost of making that most intimate album. It’s unsurprising, then, that its follow-up has an armslength quality to it, dealing in crises global and existential via densely layered, ’90s-toned electronic arrangements. Befitting our current times, its dissonant moments make you work to find meaning and, at times, pleasure; its most impenetrable songs play like remixes, where you’re curious to hear the originals. But at its best it is delicious and seductive, as on Landslide; lithe and restrained on the Kraftwerkconjuring pop shrug of Video Game; gloriously careening on Ativan (named for the antianxiety medication), where Stevens sings of pants-shitting, Buffalo Bill and the blood of Jesus. His songwriting here is as superb as ever. Both beguiling and frustrating,

The Ascension is complex, bold and oddly lovable. Sophie Harris