I said to a good friendtoday, while we were bothlistening intently to thisalbum, that it wouldn’t bewrong to place SufjanStevens in the classicalsection of our store. Of course, that won’thappen within this millennium, but we wereboth amazed at the layers upon layers ofinstrumentation that accompanied the layersupon layers of vocals.

A few hours later, Ilistened again and was captivated by thebeautiful, yet all-too-short, ‘Futile Devices’, thetypically Stevens ‘Vesuvius’ and the 25-minuteclosing track ‘Impossible Soul’. Phew!

There’s abit of everything on this album, more so thanhis other releases, and on first listen theyseemed more together than this … but it’sonly my second listen and Sufjan has proventhat he’s a stayer. So stick with it, as I will, andallow yourself to enter his world.