- It’s proven increasingly difficult -or perhaps reliably difficult- to pin down the artistic directions of Sufjan Stevens. The Michigan based singer-songwriter and founder of the eclectic Asthmatic Kitty records has adopted nearly as many sounds as he has characters in his songwriting, using the one to flesh out the other and often producing something equally, unexpectedly wild.

To hear that he was returning ‘to his folk roots’ can’t help but get a body wondering why. The answer, as it happens, is almost too easily symmetrical. Carrie & Lowell is a record that cuts much closer to Sufjan himself, telling his own stories rather than the erratic outsider-super-hero adventures of The Age Of Adz or treating us to the menagerie of oddballs that populate Illinoise. The new record isn’t about Sufjan only, though, it has its own little cast, most obviously the titular Carrie Stevens and Lowell Bram, Sufjan’s mum and stepdad.

Sufjan treats Carrie with the kind of philosophical equanimity that he brings to so much of his work, even though his relationship with his mother has clearly been traumatic in the extreme. Carrie’s existence was marked by a lifelong struggle with mental illness and addiction, abandoning her young children and only reappearing every now and then during the remainder of her life; she died of cancer in 2012. It’s clearly been playing on Sufjan’s mind since then.

Carrie and Lowell isn’t a return to folk, it’s a more quiet and considered record than Stevens has ever made, which is saying something. It’s so full of whispery insights that, at first listen, it can seem…lacking in detail, almost empty. The rush of the lyrics over the most restrained backing is a flood that has to be sifted before the gold comes to light. Not for long though, for sure. Even the seemingly coldest moments are like an icy seal, holding back a torrent of emotion.

Opener, Death With Dignity, plays out some of the most obvious, even manipulative hooks: Sufjan’s voice rises to a quavering falsetto on the line: “I don’t know where to begin / I lost my strength completely...” Some of the rhyming figures are almost trite, like “...Oh be near me / Tired old mare / With the wind in your hair,” but then dying is always surrounded by trite platitudes delivered by the well-intentioned. Such overly simplistic rhymes play out elsewhere on the record, on a song like Fourth Of July: “Well, you do enough talk / My little hawk / Why do you cry?” A surface layer of childish word games are a veil for the impossible sadness of the death of a parent. At such times, the playful tone is of course jarring, but sometimes it even seems angry. If I’m reading too much into it, Stevens certainly knows how to speak sparingly and with terrible power: “A friend is a friend / And we all know / How this will end.” There’s so many moments of clever lyricism that it’s very difficult to know which to share. However, when he gives into the full weight of his feeling, for instance, when discussing reasons not to take one’s own life on Only Thing, it’s tough to ignore: “The only thing that keeps me from cutting my arm / Crosshatch, warm bath, Holiday Inn after dark.”

The backing is usually simple but beautiful, finger-picked guitar figures and piano, given an echoing but still restrained treatment. There’s no drums, but every now and then you’ll hear an only vanishingly present synth beat, almost like a click-track. These contribute to a feeling that this whole creation is brittley precise, as though Stevens were clinically distancing himself from the material. Given what he’s dealing with it may well be the only way to have made this record without surrendering to cloying sentiment.

There are a few electronic flourishes on the album. One of the most persistent is the use of ambient codas, again Death With Dignity lays out the formula obviously: synthy harmonies, a swell of steel guitar and voices that could almost be Gregorian chant. It seems to be a very literal marking of life’s passing. I’m kind of surprised that it works, especially in multiple moments across the album. There are other such touches -like indie-folk woo-ooh-oohs- that should really fall flat, but it is a testament to the strength of Stevens’ overall vision that once you tap the main vein of its meaning, very little can get in the way.

Carrie & Lowell is such an expression of Stevens himself that it seems almost irrelevant to note that what is actually an indie-folk record can take such a tired style and reinvigorate it so thoroughly. You do have to do a little work to find your way into it, but once you do it's an investment that is rewarded many times over. An intimate, even obsessional examination of death that is as full of beauty as it is full of pain; Carrie & Lowell is a towering achievement.

- Chris Cobcroft.