Sufjan Stevens
' second release,
Enjoy Your Rabbit
, is a vast departure from the pan-ethnic
folk
of his debut. Using almost no exterior samples,
Stevens
crafts an
electronic
, all-"instrumental" song cycle based on the symbols of the Chinese zodiac. While working within these considerably narrower confines, he still maps out a wide musical territory by using each symbol as a mode, each one exploring different textures and tempos and, in the process, evoking a surprising array of moods. At times eerie and ominous like a backwoods
Autechre
, other times sounding like more
club
-oriented fare,
sometimes trades in bloops and bleeps for oblique glitches and crackles, but the underlying guiding principle is wide-eyed exploration that fills nearly every track with a sense of playfulness.
never gets too serious, although at times it's very intense. Many tracks even have some sort of musical pun working just under the surface; for instance,
"Year of the Horse"
is by far the longest, clocking in at over 13 minutes, and
"Year of the Ox"
has a regular, heavy thudding beat. ~ Jason Nickey