Sufjan Stevens Brings His Dark, Contemplative Music To Bushnell

There’s always been a dark veil hanging over Sufjan Stevens, a Brooklyn-based musician who’ll perform at the Bushnell in Hartford on Sunday, April 12. Listening to his music, you can imagine him staring at you with knitted brows (as he appeared recently at Pitchfork.com) or zoning out, deep in thought (pretty close to how he looks in a recent promotional image).

In the past, sitting down to hear a new Sufjan Stevens album was like plunking down $10 for a new Wes Anderson film: Fans would find something (maybe everything) to love, detractors still wouldn’t get what all the fuss was about, and in-betweeners would admire the attention to detail, the singularity of vision, the mastery of the songwriting craft — before retreating to familiar ground.

“Carrie & Lowell,” Stevens’ just-released seventh album, however, might be accessible enough to grab and hold anyone who’s been on the fence. There’s no weird electronic rubble to sift through, no raga-like instrumental passages or drum solos (no drums at all, actually). There’s also not a bad song on the album.

Some of it might seem contradictory; Stevens sings about life and death, drugs and suicide, mythology, religion and painful childhood memories, often in a major key with ambitious melodies that stretch well beyond octaves (as a melodist, Stevens is supremely gifted). There’s little slack on these songs, as though the strings running beneath chord progressions and structures have been pulled almost painfully tight; not a measure is misplaced or left to chance (unlike, say, “Too Bright,” a 2014 album by Perfume Genius, which is still in my mind, with dramatic pauses and an experimental spirit that seems to suggest accidents and mistakes should be celebrated).

Stevens named his new album after his mother, Carrie, who abandoned his family when he was a year old, and his stepfather, Lowell, who was married to Carrie in the 1980s for five years and now works as the director for Asthmatic Kitty, Stevens’ record label. Carrie, who died in 2012 from stomach cancer (Stevens was with her), was schizophrenic, bipolar, addicted to drugs and alcohol and was homeless for stretches of her adult life. Stevens now considers Lowell, who worked at an Oregon bookstore when Stevens was young, to be his “closest fatherly companion,” as he told Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal, even though he was raised primarily by his biological father, Rasjid, and his stepmother.

As a young kid, Stevens spent three summers with Carrie and Lowell in Oregon, where his strongest memories of his mother were formed. (Earlier in his career, Stevens released two albums, “Michigan” and “Illinois,” that he said were installments in a larger 50-state album project, before dismissing it as gimmickry; now, one could argue that “Oregon” is a fitting subtitle to this collection.) “I just wanted to be near you,” Stevens repeats on “Eugene,” the prettiest, and perhaps most quietly devastating song, with an insistent, near-Baroque motor rhythm and quasi theme-and-variations structure. On “Fourth of July,” we hear Carrie’s voice: “I’m sorry I left, though it was for the best, but it never felt right,” before a chorus repeats “we’re all going to die” at the song’s close, like voices rising from a steady, internal monologue.

Stevens sings about suicide; “the only thing that keeps me from driving this car half-light jacknife into the canyon at night,” he offers on “The Only Thing,” before trailing off into mythological name-dropping. This continues in the second verse: “The only thing that keeps me from cutting my arm / cross hatch, warm bath, Holiday Inn after dark.” (Again, no he doesn’t reveal what’s stopping him. He deals with pain by turning to drugs and alcohol: “Give out to give in,” Stevens sings on “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross,” “I search for the capsule I lost. …Get drunk to get laid,” the song continues, “I take one more hit when you depart/I’ll drive that stake through the center of my heart/Lonely vampire/Inhaling its fire/I’m chasing the dragon too far.” How far is too far?

There are few chromatic tones and even fewer tempo shifts or actual pauses, and dynamic levels stay fairly constant; Stevens adds drama by adding a measure here or there, extending phrases or eliding them into what follows. The wordless Greek chorus on “Carrie & Lowell” is the ghostly ambience tacked on toward the end of nearly every song; “Death with Dignity” and “Drawn to the Blood” expand outward into cathedral-like passages, after guitars and pianos have dissipated. There’s an unspoken correlation, it seems, between a song’s gravity and intensity of its coda (“Eugene,” poppy and dream-like, has none; the coda in “Drawn to the Blood” is quite long). “Should Have Known Better” and the title track race along with unceasing, harpsichord-like guitar figures. Stevens’ voice, double-tracked on every song except “John My Beloved,” rarely rises above a whisper, but it drips with emotion, and often reaches a feverish falsetto.

It’s also true that much of Stevens’s new music would fit onto a Wes Anderson soundtrack, with textures that recall Mark Mothersbaugh’s work on “Rushmore.” (At times, Stevens sounds like Elliot Smith, a tragic Oregon figure whose “Needle in the Hay” was used in the “Royal Tennenbaums” suicide-attempt scene.) Unlike an Anderson film, however (or any film), “Carrie & Lowell” presents poignant, often painful snapshots — being taught to swim, in a community pool, by a man who can’t pronounce “Sufjan” (he ends up calling him “Suburu”), or being left in a video store as a toddler — rather than a continuous narrative. “What’s the point of singing songs if they’ll never even hear you?” Stevens sings at the end of “Eugene.” There’s little chance, I’d argue, that these songs will go unheard.

>>Sufjan Stevens performs at the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts in Hartford on Sunday, April 12, at 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $40. Information: bushnell.org.