The new album by Sufjan Stevens is excellent and I give it five stars. My favorite track is “Drawn to the Blood” (which is simply an astonishing track, with even a prog-worthy soundscape generated at the end).

There is a very good review of the album over at CWR. Here is a taste:

Stevens’ new release, Carrie & Lowell, is his most delicate and difficult offering to date, due to the subject matter that drove him to be the conduit for these songs. This collection is an exploratory guide to what grief demands of us. He admits the album was born from a terrifying inner place he entered after pain overwhelmed him following the death of his mother Carrie in 2012. Her life had been fraught with alcoholism, depression, and schizophrenia; their relationship was nearly nonexistant, marked by her leaving Stevens as a child. What ensued was a gaping distance and Sufjan’s longing to know her—a knowing that never arrived. He returned to Oregon to make parts of the record, the coastal state holding his only fading childhood memories of his mother.

The subject matter is truly grim, but Sufjan’s signature touch of genius is an ability to draw listeners into intimate places—terrifying places of loss and longing that may never be reconciled—and reveal them in exquisite ways. From start to end the songs are woven together with a thread of almost-whispered vocals, minimal production, and background room noise. Upon first listening you expect an eventual lift from the muffled vocals—a lift that never comes during the entire record, which after many listens to me feels just what grief is like: a pressing in, a weightedness, always there, never letting up.