Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner & James McAlister - Planetarium review: ‘When it coheres it’s quite a trip’

Too many ideas and a lack of focus at times
New album: Planetarium
Richard Godwin9 June 2017

There’s a veritable indie star-command at the helm of this 18-song suite about the Solar System.

Sufjan Stevens is the idiosyncratic singer-songwriter who once promised to record a concept album about each of America’s 50 states; Nico Muhly is a prolific composer of pulsing viola concertos and modernist operas; Bryce Dessner is one of the fraternal guitarists in the National; and James McAlister is Stevens’s long-time percussionist.

The quartet came together under Muhly’s command in 2013 for a live interplanetary collaboration in Brooklyn but only recently took the material to the studio.

Stevens’s voice contemplates man’s place in the grand scheme of the Kuiper Belt, Neptune, Black Energy, etc, amid Muhly’s signature shimmers, Dessner’s cascading guitars and McAlister’s quicksilver percussion. Pluto is as haunting and lonely as the heavenly body that inspired it; the entry of the house drums on Saturn is thrilling.

There are almost too many ideas, however, and a lack of focus; Stevens’s singing feels a little mannered in places too. But when it coheres it’s quite a trip.

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