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The song titles on Sufjan Stevens’s mindblowingly good new Illinois disc are so long, vivid and evocative that it’d take at least three reviews this size to transcribe them all. The amazing part? After listening to Illinois, you won’t even think the rambling track listing is pretentious. On the second of his planned 50 love-letter albums to all the states, Stevens enlists a mini-choir, a string section and horns in addition to playing about a zillion instruments, for a glorious cacophony that sounds like he’s actually imagined a mental map of the entire Prairie State. Instead of the morose sameyness of 2003’s Michigan or the spiritual folk of last year’s Seven Swans, Stevens evokes the idiosyncracies and character of every stop on his journey through song. Dude goes from communing with the ghost of Fog poet Carl Sandburg, with the calypso shuffle and trumpet fanfare of Come On! Feel The Illinoise!, to imagining a serial killer’s formative years on the spare, acoustic and broken-hearted John Wayne Gacy, Jr. It’s an ambitious and unwieldy experiment that could’ve gone terribly wrong but Stevens pulls it off with grace and gusto.
