Illinois

Twenty-two tracks in about seventy-four minutes, and the subtractive test bites often. The load-bearing pieces resist it: the UFO prelude must open, in hushed piano and wonder; John Wayne Gacy, Jr. is the moral centre; Chicago and Casimir Pulaski Day are the hinge of the first half; The Seer’s Tower is the descent the close needs, and Out of Egypt the compelled exit. The test finds give in three places. Most short interludes are jokes of titling, a cheer of seconds or a reprise named as a stage cue, and only the Mary Todd reprise and the Lincoln temple do work the sequence needs. The middle fancies could lose one or two without the argument losing a fact. And the length is permitted by the state-album conceit, which invites inventory. That holds the axis lowest; the cap is met, narrowly.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and holds: a private conscience and a public history share one structure of guilt and grace, and a citizen cannot admire his state without finding himself in what it did. John Wayne Gacy, Jr. tells the killer’s life plainly, almost tenderly, then turns the confession on the singer, who asks the listener to “look beneath the floorboards”. Casimir Pulaski Day sets a friend’s death from cancer beside a prayer that is not answered, and refuses comfort. The Black Hawk War discloses by title, a fanfare under the words How to Demolish an Entire Civilization. Chicago’s “a lot of mistakes” is the self’s ledger beside the state’s. Held below the bar: the whimsy of the middle surveys Illinois without disclosing it, and the state’s history beyond the Black Hawk title is more pageant than finding.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Elevation is frequent and of several kinds. Chicago rises from its strings and piano pulse into a choir over “All things go”, the record’s best-known height. Casimir Pulaski Day reaches the quiet sublime of grief, banjo and voice with a trumpet that enters near the end and does not console. Come On! Feel the Illinoise! lifts in its odd metre and its choir; The Predatory Wasp builds over minutes to a brass and vocal climax; The Seer’s Tower is the dreadful kind, a slow piano descent into an apocalypse; The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders is a long ascent of minimalist pulse and massed voices. The UFO prelude is a small, grave wonder. Against this the middle fancies have energy more than height and several interludes stay level. Height on seven or eight of twenty-two tracks, most of the long ones, carries the figure.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Myth is evoked abundantly and built in two places. Evoked: the Columbian Exposition as a white city of progress, Carl Sandburg as a visiting spirit, Superman claimed by a small town, Lincoln’s temple, the Sears Tower made a seer’s tower and so Babel and watchtower at once, and the last title’s exit out of Egypt with the dust shaken from the sandals, the Exodus and the disciples’ departure in one line. Built: in John Wayne Gacy, Jr., where the monster becomes the mirror of the sinner and a particular man, a clown suit, a house in the suburbs, carries the oldest doctrine of shared fallenness; and in Casimir Pulaski Day, where a school holiday becomes Job’s question asked by a teenager. Held below the bar: the state is furnished with myths, not built into one, and the frame of a promised land under judgment is laid by the first and last titles and not borne through the middle.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The inheritance is Stevens’s own Michigan (2003), which had set the method, a state’s places and people in banjo folk, brass and long titles, and Seven Swans (2004); beside them the chamber pop of the decade, the minimalism of Reich and Glass in the interlocking piano and mallets, the marching band, the church choir and the show tune. The turn is real in scale: the indie folk record made maximal, orchestrated, choral and seventy-four minutes long, its confessional songs set inside a civic pageant, a children’s-choir brightness carried into songs about a killer and a dying friend. The stake was small. His previous state record had proved the template, the plan of fifty states protected the risk as a game, and each means was inherited. A large turn in degree on a path already laid: level with Zooropa at 7.8, well under Low at 8.9.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Change the form and part of what the record knows goes. The form is a pageant interrupted by confession: the civic songs, with their fanfares, chapter titles and choirs, are broken by intimate ones sung close to the microphone over banjo or piano, and the knowledge, that the citizen and the sinner are one person, lives in that alternation. Gacy follows the Exposition’s white city at once; Casimir Pulaski Day follows Chicago, and the sorrow is sharper for the euphoria. The titles are part of the form, putting the irony into print beside music that is never ironic. The sequence is counted here, once: wonder at the open, the founding crime, the exposition, the confession, the long middle of fancies, then the tower and the exit. Held below the top: the middle third’s order is permitted rather than compelled, and several interludes are containers for a joke.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Twenty-one years supply evidence, some of it strong. The record has been reworked across media, as a stage work that reads it as a narrative it only implies, the kind of yield this axis prefers. Listeners have kept the words open for two decades, above all in Casimir Pulaski Day and The Predatory Wasp, whose love between friends was heard differently as the record aged. Return repays formally too: the counter-lines in the arrangements separate on close listening, in Chicago’s strings and the layered metre of Come On! Feel the Illinoise!. What holds the figure is the rest. The middle fancies are exhausted early, and the long titles, once read, give the same joke each time. The well is deep in five or six songs and shallow in a dozen.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The field is the indie and alternative music of the 2000s. The intrinsic force is real: the record showed that the small-label folk record could be orchestral, choral, historical and devotional at once, and that a confessional singer could carry a concept album about a place without either swallowing the other. That widened the idiom more than it reorganised it; chamber pop and the concept album were established, and the means were inherited. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within its field the reach was large, Chicago and Casimir Pulaski Day passed into common use, and the orchestral turn in indie folk later in the decade is commonly traced in part to it. Outside that field it was narrower, and no practice can be shown to turn on it alone. It stands below Remain in Light at 8.5.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Survival is weighed over twenty-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as issued and has been reissued on vinyl. Presence is continuous and wide for its kind: the album is heard whole, Chicago and Casimir Pulaski Day are in common use, the songs are covered and sung, and a stage work made from the record has renewed it for a new public, though popularity is presence and not proof. The fabric holds little fixed to 2005: acoustic instruments, brass and voices date slowly, and the home-made sound has kept rather than aged. The figure sits at the top of what the span allows, a tenth over Boxer at nineteen years and level with Elephant at twenty-three.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The arranging is the strength and in places load-bearing: Chicago’s string ostinato and choir, the layered metre of Come On! Feel the Illinoise!, the minimalist piano and mallets of The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders, the brass voicings of The Predatory Wasp, each placed so that a dense texture stays legible. Stevens plays much of it himself and multitracks it, and the voice, soft and narrow, is used exactly in the intimate songs, close and unadorned in Casimir Pulaski Day. The faults weigh on a share of the record: it was recorded at home, the drums are thin and sometimes boxy, the low end is light, the choirs sound small when the arrangement asks for mass, and the voice cannot carry the climaxes it writes. Below Low at 9.0 and Remain in Light at 8.7; a tenth under m b v at 8.5.

Score: 8.4 / 10

One law governs most of the record: everything in the state is seen with the same wonder and the same accounting, so that a sighting in the sky, a massacre, a killer, a stepmother and a wasp are received as marvels and as matters of conscience. Take the two most distant elements: One Last “Whoo-Hoo!” for the Pullman, seconds of a cheer for a company town, and Casimir Pulaski Day, a death and an unanswered prayer. They obey the same law at the level of the voice, the grief sung with the same plainness as the cheer. The range is wide: fanfare, minimalism, banjo ballad, show tune, choral hymn, drone. What strains the law is tone: the whimsy of the middle fancies and of the titles sometimes plays against the gravity of the confessions rather than within it. No break; a seam the record half intends.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Judged on what the record holds, with no discount for the album form. The orders are many, held by one frame, the state, and one voice: history and the state in the Black Hawk War, the Exposition, Lincoln and Mary Todd and the Sears Tower; labour in the Pullman and the workers of the Rock River Valley; crime and conscience in Gacy; the sacred in Casimir Pulaski Day, The Seer’s Tower and the exodus of the close; the family in a stepmother; friendship and desire in the Wasp and Casimir; the natural order in a prairie fire, a wasp and a sighting in the sky; the mass culture of Superman. What holds the figure: several orders arrive in a title or a single interlude rather than being held, labour is named more than sung, and the integration is by frame and sequence more than by any one song that holds several orders at once.

Score: 7.9 / 10