Turns out Sufjan Stevens didn't come out of nowhere. While most of us first encountered him as the Brooklyn bard behind last year's precious Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lake State, Stevens had in fact made two very different recordings prior to that album's release. Proceeding in reverse chronological order, in 2001, Sufjan put together Enjoy Your Rabbit, which was, for all intents and purposes, a noise album based on the Chinese zodiac cycle. Sounding more like a side project than a juicy bit of Stevens' history, that record understandably throws new Sufjan devotees for a loop, especially given the sparse acoustic sound of his most recent release, Seven Swans.
In contrast, Stevens' 2000 debut, A Sun Came, makes much more sense as a Michigan prequel. The disc's music was written and recorded in 1998-- back when a collegiate Sufjan played whistles for the Michigan folk quartet Marzuki-- and provides a backstory rich enough to suggest that his music could have gone in any number of directions.
Over the course of the album's original 18 tracks, Stevens revealed his Celtic, Middle-Eastern, Indian, American folk, and indie rock influences, experimenting with noise and vocal samples, and playing no less than 14 instruments. In this respect, A Sun Came suffers from a double-edged bloat. Stevens had many disparate ideas here, and his songs were necessarily dense as a result, yet he refused to censor himself. After a sprawling 78 minutes (the reissue adds three tracks), A Sun Came bears more than a few missteps and a good number of head-scratchers, but by chance also documents some bright beginnings for this increasingly popular songwriter.
Sufjan's whistle tenure with Marzuki betrays itself instantly: "We Are What You Say" opens briskly, with swoops of guitar plucks providing a cushion for the harmonized flutters of wood flutes. The song's Celtic current surfaces most noticeably when heavy-handed percussion ushers in a chorus of dense countermelodies. Maybe the theme from Titanic ruined me, but the wood flute begins to grate by the song's midway break, after which Sufjan steams through an instrumental outro stuffed with violin screams and even another recorder that had been tucked deep into the mix.
Unfortunately, the density of these compositions doesn't always make for an interesting listen-- particularly when the song's building blocks are themselves uninteresting. "A Winner Needs a Wand" is a good example of this: The track retains the crowdedness of "We Are What You Say", but the predictability of its flute melodies is a setback.
Throughout A Sun Came, Sufjan routinely summons these prominent wood flute flutters-- which is admirable as a thematic link among the album's quite different moods, but ultimately feels like a superficial gimmick. Messy, distorted guitar molasses slurps back and forth on "Demetrius", Sufjan's surprisingly rocking track that recalls Sebadoh noise and the melodies of a lo-fi Jesus Lizard. It's one of the album's best tracks, until midway through, Sufjan mistakenly launches into a Middle-Eastern instrumental rant that talks loud but says nothing. Later, the deliberate piano line and Sufjan's chilling, hushed vocals could have resulted in a fine post-rock outing during "Dumb I Sound", until those flat wood flute lines reappear and ruin the moment. And on the gimmick-free Elliott Smith-via-Sonic Youth tribute, "The Oracle Said Wander", Sufjan sounds out of his element, and the song comes off cold.
There are a few instant groaners, too. Two chords into "Rake", Sufjan's adds a lame third and unwittingly relegates his possibly interesting self-duet into Goo Goo Dolls territory. "Wordsworth's Ridge" begins like an unaccompanied acoustic improvisation, only for an insistently lame flute and piano parts to muzzle its bite. "Happy Birthday" revisits acoustic alternative radio, this time with perhaps the album's most obnoxious vocal melody.
These days, Sufjan manages the impression that he's serious about his music and his faith, and maybe to the point of sacrificing his sense of humor. It's unclear how true the appearance matches his reality, but three times on A Sun Came, Sufjan seems to indulge in light genre parody, to pleasing results. "Rice Pudding" marinates in the absurd Sonic Youth noodling he apes on "Demetrius", while the fiery woodwind squelches on "Satan's Saxophones" seem an unwitting musical satire of free jazz. Most directly humorous is "Super Sexy Woman": Did Sufjan really just sing, "She'll shoot a super fart/ The deadly silent kind"?!
For all A Sun Came's directions, its most relevant one comes as the last track on the remastered version of the album. "You Are the Rake", which Sufjan recorded in 2004, is a remake of one of A Sun Came's sore spots, "Rake". Six years after he first wrote the vocal melody, Sufjan bids farewell to all the bells and tin whistles that clogged up the song, and instead simply picks up his banjo. His chords are retuned and delivered more sparsely here, which accommodates the addition of the ever-present Smith sisters, who further tease out the song's deep hook. The difference between the two renditions is remarkable, and testifies to how much Sufjan has progressed as a musician and songwriter. As a bloated reissue, A Sun Came ironically proves that for Sufjan, less is often much more, especially when melodies are as convincing as the ones he writes.
