New Music Reviews: Sufjan Stevens and The Tubs

Two solidly enjoyable albums this week. Twenty years after his breakthrough album, Greetings from Michigan, The Great Lake State, Sufjan Stevens is back with an especially forlorn record. Meanwhile, UK band The Tubs deliver their debut, energetic and concise. Enjoy!

Sufjan Stevens

Javelin

2023, 8/10
It’s an understatement to say that it’s been a tough year for Sufjan Stevens. He lost his long-term partner earlier in the year, an event that’s reflected in the opening lines of the album.

Goodbye, evergreen
You know I love you
But everything heaven sent
Must burn out in the end

Goodbye Evergreen

He was also diagnosed with Guillain-Barre Syndrome, an automimmune. He had to relearn how to walk.

Stevens is an adventurous artist. He’s best known for his sensitive, introspective works like Carrie and Lowell and ‘Casimir Pulaski Day’. But his career has ventured much further – like the electronica of The Age of Adz. Javelin has hints of Stevens’ arranging flair – stacking choirs and strings – but at heart it’s another soul-baring acoustic record.

The best songs are the most emotional. ‘Everything That Rises’ is named for a Flannery O’Connor collection of short stories, with Stevens singing “Jesus lift me up to a higher plane”. I’ve never heard anyone use the word “genuflecting” in a song before, but ‘Genuflecting Ghost” is gorgeous and hymn-like, Stevens’ voice vibrating and vulnerable.

Stevens has made better acoustic albums. But Carrie and Lowell is a high bar, and Javelin is well worthwhile.

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The Tubs

Dead Meat

2023, 8/10
Dead Meat is The Tubs’ debut album, but they’ve been around for a while. Lead vocalist Owen ‘O’ Williams was previously in Gruesome Williams. Dead Meat is a tight 26-minute record. It’s hooky enough to qualify as power pop, but there are a few rough edges, with traces of indie and punk. Most notable power pop is American, so it’s a different spin to have a vocalist with a heavy UK accent. Williams lists his influences as Richard and Linda Thompson, The Jam, The 1975, and Felt’s Maurice Deebank, so it’s unsurpising that I like his band’s music.

I don’t Know How It Works sounds like a Warren Zevon song, complete with a great riff. The call-and-echo guitar riff of ‘Sniveller’ is the record’s best hook. The alternation between jangly acoustic guitars and noisy shoegaze guitars is a great arrangement touch. ‘Round the Bend’ lifts the tempo, halfway between punk and an Irish pub band.

Dead Meat is an impressive debut. There are enough ideas to suggest The Tubs could break free of power pop’s penchant for one-hit wonders.

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