Review: Sufjan Stevens live at Hamer Hall on February 28th.
It’s cruel, cruel irony to leave a Sufjan Stevens concert only to find out you have to go to a funeral the next morning – it’s a double dose of mourning.
“I really do sing a lot about death, hey!” the American singer-songwriter says during his only talk break – well, it’s more like a manifesto – of a two-hour set; the last of a three-night sold out run at Melbourne’s Hamer Hall.
Sufjan’s a veteran now: seven studio albums and more than 16 years in the game absolutely show, his setup mastered and an infallible rapport with the hugely talented multi-instrumentalist band.
Hamer Hall – which he’s filled out before during his tour for Age Of Adz – is the perfect backdrop to the profound indie-folk; candle-like lights soaring overhead and a stage lighting plot that swells with the music and multiplies the palpable emotion in the room.
Much of the set is – understandably, cuts from Stevens’ current record, Carrie & Lowell. An anecdotal record about the relationship between his mother Carrie and his stepfather – you guessed it, Lowell – and ultimately Carrie’s death in 2012.
It’s an album not just about love, but very blunt in its discussion of suicidal thoughts, violence, hospitals, regret and the aftermath of losing his mother – and it works beautifully live, all the more touching with projections of home videos behind Sufjan and his band. If anything, he seems a little introspective and disconnected from the music at times, but how could you not be with subject matter like that?
Following Carrie & Lowell’s closing track, ‘Blue Bucket of Gold’, was a massive cosmic sound-and-lightscape extraordinaire – surely more than ten minutes long, a mesmerising combination of beaming lights and sounds so intense you couldn’t really do anything but stare wide-eyed at the vast space, the strobes and the abstract music: as seems to be Sufjan’s way, communicating profundities without the need for speaking.
[include_post id=”448272″]We’ve said a hundred times before that encores are just the worst thing ever, and that the world would be a far better place with the predictable, excitement-less extra songs tacked on the end of seemingly every set these days.
We’ll make an exception for Sufjan, though – who scaled the band down to huddle around one microphone for his encore, for which he apparently had a lot more time tonight than in previous shows. Seven songs and two lots of “esoteric psychobabble” about the multiplicity of experience, and togetherness, and finding your calling in life, left us all very philosophical.
For hardcore Stevens fans, too, it was an absolute treat – not only did we get the scarcely-played and eerily gorgeous song about the serial killer ‘John Wayne Gacy, Jr.’, but he pulled out ‘Romulus’, a cut from his album Michigan, for the first time since TWO THOUSAND AND NINE. It’s a stunning track on its own, but played after such a long break and with that beautiful folky setup of four band members around a single microphone, it was pretty hard to beat.
Ending with ‘Chicago’, the centerpiece of 2005 album Illinois, we were pulled starkly out of this dreamy existence the entire audience had been so invested in for the past two hours as the lights came up and reality flooded back.
It does seem a shame to play ‘Chicago’ acoustically, though – that track absolutely stands on its beautiful swelling strings. By this point, complaining was futile – it’s clichéd, but strolling out of the theatre people were genuinely barely speaking, still under Sufjan’s dark but wholly mesmerising spell: to be honest, I think I might still be in the trance.
