Silver & Gold, Sufjan Stevens' holiday-themed follow-up to 2006's 42-song-long Songs for Christmas collection, stretches 59 tracks across nearly three hours. The box set includes a fold-it-yourself paper star ornament. And stickers. Also: temporary tattoos and a poster. There's an 80-page booklet, too. All of which may make you think: "Wow, Sufjan is really, really, really fucking obsessed with Christmas." And you would be correct. But his fixation isn't born of pure peppermint joy or the eternal spite of not finding that Power Wheels under the tree as a toddler. It's more complicated than that. About a third of the tracks here are Sufjan originals, and the music ranges from reverent, to intergalactic, to angelic, to positively looney. The stickers and tattoos include a skeleton/soldier throwing a bomb, a panda in a Christmas sweater holding a human skull, and a chainsaw-wielding snowman. The crowded poster shows a half-alien/half-human breastfeeding her alien offspring, a sea monster, a robot owl, a cigarette-smoking baby with a lobster claw for a hand, and Jesus on the phone with a caption next to him that reads, "DAD!" And along with lyrics and chords and insanely cut-and-pasted family photos and a hard drive's worth of outre fonts, the booklet features an essay from a pastor that concludes thusly: "Advent is ultimately about death. The end is near. You are going to die. Happy Holidays."
The entire project is an excavation into Sufjan's conflicted Christmas heart. He also penned two essays for the booklet, and both are filled with some of the most critical seasonal tidings you're ever likely to hear. In the first, which reads like a tortured self-justification for the project itself, he observes that the yearly economy-boosting hoopla reduces us to "that clammy, pre-pubescent Christmas wish-list spoiled brat kid of our insatiable childhood, throwing an empirical fit on Santa's lap, faced with the hard-candy facts of reality, knowing for certain we will never really get what we want for Christmas, or in life, for that matter." And in the second, he dives deep into the history and hypocrisy of Christmas trees specifically, concluding that: "The Christmas tree has become nothing more than a symbol of environmental bondage, illustrating all the negligent ways in which man has taken possession of the world in order to destroy it. [...] In a word, the Christmas tree is our bitch." Um, joy to the world?
Of course, Sufjan's uniquely bizarre feelings toward all things merry is a boon for the rest of us, who naturally have the same kind of anxieties and phobias about the holidays, but lack the vast musical talent and/or OCD graphic design skills to make it really count. Because while he's extremely wary of the idea of putting a Christmas box set out just in time for the trampling Black Friday hordes, he's no less susceptible to wintertime whimsy than anyone else. "Christmas is what you make of it," he writes, in one of the more level-headed booklet passages, "and its songs reflect mystery and magic as expertly as they clatter and clang with the most audacious and rambunctious intonations of irreverence."
Like Songs for Christmas, which boxed EPs recorded for friends and family each year from 2001-2006, Silver & Gold has another five discs that span songs from 2006-2010, with some additional tune-ups laid down over the last couple of years. Essentially, it's an extremely over-the-top scrapbook, detailing the musical phases, friends, and feelings coursing through Sufjan's world each year. But unlike the meticulously pleasant Songs for Christmas, which more or less sounds exactly like what a casual fan (or detractor) might expect a Sufjan Stevens Christmas box set to sound like, the music inside Silver & Gold can be as downright strange as its accompanying accessories.
Recorded with the National's Dessner brothers a year and a half after the release of Illinois, 2006's Gloria is the most traditionally Sufjan-y thing here. With its careful guitar picking, pristine choir, and overall sense of in-the-lines tastefulness, it's the disc least likely to offend grandmothers on Christmas Day. Gloria also has two of the collection's finest originals with "The Midnight Clear" and "Carol of St. Benjamin the Bearded One", both of which could sneak onto Illinois without much complaint. "I will delight in this," sings Sufjan, sincerely backing up his own faith, before a choir quietly comes back, "Though you may doubt it."
I Am Santa's Helper is the wooliest of the bunch, and also the worst. It's got the most tracks at 23, but many are just two-minute fragments, bits of solo piano, or goofball jamming. It still lasts 45 minutes, and by the mid-way point, Sufjan and his buddies' ramshackle racket goes from endearing to annoying. It was recorded right around the premiere of his ambitious BQE project, which could explain the tossed-off-ness. Still, it's instructive of this songwriter's musical narrative; it sounds lost, searching for something new and settling on something half-baked.
Christmas Infinity Voyage is where things get interesting. These songs were originally recorded at the end of 2008, a relatively quiet time for Sufjan, and they reveal an artist in transition. A version of this disc made it online that Christmas, showing Sufjan toying with new electronic textures. That leaked release was intriguing, but ultimately unsure (Sufjan himself calls it "poorly realized" in the Silver & Gold booklet). So he took the same songs and largely re-recorded them over the last two years, using the technical know-how he built up while working on 2010's radical and brilliant The Age of Adz. So, of all the material here, Infinity Voyage comes closest to that album's mechanized sheen. There's a roboticized "Do You Hear What I Hear?" that lasts nearly 10 minutes, eventually spiraling gloriously out of control with Sufjan repeating "do you feel what I feel?" with enough vocal processing slathered over his voice to make T-Pain blush. There's a brief and bubbly cover of Prince's "Alphabet St." that recalls Beck's white-boy funk circa Midnite Vultures-- it makes little sense within the context of a Christmas album, but only a fool would protest. This is the disc most likely to confuse the hell out of your grandmother.
Infinity Voyage also boasts the set's strongest originals. "Christmas in the Room" is Silver & Gold's best bet at some sort of bizarro new standard, as it combines Sufjan's old-school acoustic balladry with some subtle new-school electronics. It's about finding Christmas-- and all its joy and sorrow-- in another person: "No travel plans, no shopping malls/ No candy canes or Santa Claus/ For as the day of rest draws near/ It's just the two of us this year." Meanwhile, "The Child With the Star on His Head" uses the birth of Christ to try to transcend the little things that make up modern human existence, things like "dictionaries," "calendars," "television," "fathers," and "consequences." But those pillars can't really be looked past, and Sufjan knows this. So he stops singing for the final 10 minutes of the quarter-hour track, and instead lets a stream-of-consciousness experimental guitar/synth/who-knows-what solos do the heavy lifting. Somehow, these cracked sounds do the job, rendering a smashed beauty that's almost impossible to translate with words. Here, Sufjan is no longer lost, and it's all too easy to get blissfully disoriented by the cacophony.
The final two discs, Let It Snow and Christmas Unicorn, ride out the momentum of Infinity Voyage, though they're not quite as out-there. Both find Sufjan continuing to experiment with synthetic sounds, though mostly as accents rather than the focus. "I'll Be Home for Christmas" gets an especially dreamy revamp, with Sufjan sounding like a quivering ghost looking down on the season's festivities. And "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" is given a minor-chord makeover, ultimately hinting at what a Radiohead Christmas album might sound like. The entire marathon ends strong with a couple of moody ruminators-- "Happy Karma Christmas" and "Justice Delivers Its Death"-- and a blowout finale with the 13-minute "Christmas Unicorn". Turns out Sufjan-- with his highly weary yet hopelessly complicit take on the holidays-- is the unicorn, and he suspects he's not alone. "I know you're just like me," he sings, before pied-piper flutes lead us to an electro freak-out that perfectly morphs into "Love Will Tear Us Apart". Within this latest mistletoe'n'holly universe Sufjan has created, the Joy Division classic makes exactly as much sense as "We Need a Little Christmas"; the Christmas spirit is a fractured one, and reveling in its inherent contradictions is the only way to get through it with your soul intact.
In the Silver & Gold essay by Pastor Thomas Vito Aiuto, he explains how the birth of Christ and Christianity helped to transfer humanity's overall narrative from cyclical to linear. That is, whereas time was an "empty medium" before, Christianity brought with it ideas of a great birth and a great death-- the apocalypse. It's intense stuff, but it's also transferable to today's Christmas which, for a 37-year-old like Sufjan or anyone who suddenly finds themselves giving more gifts than they receive, can be about ends: of innocence, of youth, of blind joy. But still, with his annual winter music-making ritual and his refusal to totally give into the more cynical aspects of the holidays-- he decided to release all of his originals here as Public Domain-- Sufjan is taking things back to the days of cycles, in a way. His songwriting no longer hews to story-like structures; he's more and more prone to extended outros that find musical answers through repetition. Talking about the Greco-Roman world, Aiuto writes, "Abstraction was for them the vehicle of truth and salvation." One listen to the frenzied and free final minutes of "The Child With the Star on His Head", and it's clear-- Sufjan sounds closer to that gospel than ever.
