Is Stevens addressing the president? Russia? Social media? Late capitalism? For the chorus, repeating and building to symphonic richness, he warns, ‘‘Don’t do to me what you did to America,’’ distantly answered by ‘‘Don’t do to me what you do to yourself.’’ ‘‘The sign of the flood or one more disaster?’’ Stevens asks. Reversed keyboard chords swoop into earshot a patient beat is built out of static and, eventually, drum-kit sounds. The album’s finale is ‘‘America,’’ a 12-minute, four-chord, mournful indictment. In ‘‘Death Star,’’ over a sculpted, popping beat that Depeche Mode would happily claim, Stevens confronts a looming environmental disaster as a real-life apocalypse: ‘‘Death star into space / What you call the human race / Expedite the Judgment Day / It’s your own damn head on that plate.’’ ‘‘I shouldn’t have looked for revelation / I should have resigned myself to this.’’ He awaits his own ascension but is consumed in doubt the song ends not with rapture but with a repeating question: ‘‘What now?’’Īs the album proceeds, Stevens is as accusatory as he is humble. ‘‘To everything there is no meaning / A season of pain and hopelessness,’’ Stevens sings. The title song of ‘‘The Ascension’’ places the narrator on his deathbed, consumed with regrets. Then it’s simultaneously cushioned and besieged, with chime and harp tones, otherworldly voices, ratcheting and rumbling percussion, staticky glitches and increasingly intrusive high-frequency beeps that eventually register as alarms. The album opens with ‘‘Make Me an Offer I Cannot Refuse,’’ a ballad-like melody that’s accompanied at first by reverent, organ-like chords.
‘‘Die Happy’’ repeats just one line - ‘‘I wanna die happy’’ - as the music brings out all the ambivalences of that sentiment: tinkling prettily and floating on celestial voices, later detuned and distorted and marching toward death. He longs to believe, but isn’t sure he can he confesses to personal failings as he lashes out at cultural ones, and he finds no guarantees of hope. And he never reduces his messages to preaching or polemic. Most of Stevens’ new tracks are thickets of counterpoint, dissonance and noises that can be comic or ominous. Compared to that album, ‘‘The Ascension’’ is single-minded, but far from simplistic.
It partly harks back to Stevens’ 2010 album, ‘‘The Age of Adz,’’ which embraced excess, piling synthesizers atop orchestras, choirs and rock band.
‘‘The Ascension’’ leaps to an opposite extreme: synthetic and outsized rather than intimately acoustic, metaphysical instead of biographical. Over the two decades since he released his debut album, ‘‘A Sun Came!,’’ in 2000, Stevens has recorded elaborate orchestral vignettes based on local lore (‘‘Illinois’’ and ‘‘Michigan’’), devotional meditations set to bare-bones banjo (‘‘Seven Swans’’), classical piano pieces (‘‘The Decalogue’’), Christmas-carol collections and his most recent album of new songs, the 2015 ‘‘Carrie & Lowell,’’ a whispery, quietly touching evocation of his parents’ lives. So ‘‘The Ascension’’ stands as the poppiest album in Stevens’ huge, multifarious catalog - but that’s only relative. His new songs often sum themselves up in succinct refrains such as ‘‘I don’t wanna play your video game’’ (‘‘Video Game’’) or ‘‘I am the future, define the future’’ (‘‘Lamentations’’).Īnd Stevens can deploy his drum machines to hit deep and hard ‘‘Video Game,’’ ‘‘Death Star’’ and ‘‘Goodbye to All That’’ have the impact of 1980s synth-pop, topped with Stevens’ own ethereal overlays.
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