Festival Music

Sufjan Stevens

Edinburgh Playhouse

Nicola Meighan

Five stars

For all of his baroque pop voyages – from Illinois to outer space – Sufjan Stevens' most enlightening journey has seen him travel inwards, backwards, to the darkness of the heart, as mapped out on this year's devastating magnum opus, Carrie and Lowell.

The Michigan indie poet's seventh album explores the throes of life, death, love and abandonment, as driven by the loss of his absent mother – the titular and troubled Carrie – who left the family home when Stevens was a young boy, and who died in 2012.

You might wager that said album's intimations to suicide, self-harm, grief, self-doubt, maternal rejection and child abuse would make for a harrowing live experience. But Stevens has an uncanny knack for couching his emotional blows in warm, sublime, uplifting songs, and this, teamed with stunning lighting and electrifying arrangements – minimalist here; prog-raucous there – made for a life-affirming show.

There were laments of disorientation, but so too were there hymns of forgiveness and cautious hope, not least picturesque aria Should Have Known Better – a show-stopping audio-visual homage to the light of life (“My brother had a daughter, the beauty that she brings...

illumination”).

His mother's apparition was invoked time and again. “Everything I feel returns to you somehow,” he lamented on drum-thundering The Only Thing, and he addressed her directly on the glorious Death With Dignity (“I forgive you mother”).

It might feel intrusive to witness grief in such close quarters, were in not for the fact that Stevens is such a generous songwriter, offering words of of solace for all of our losses. “What's the point in singing songs?” he sang on Eugene. But he'd already answered that.

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