Pitchfork

It's all fine and dandy for a musician to dabble in widely divergent styles, combining and rearranging until something new in born. But there's a fine line between that and cashing in on a trend and letting market research be your guide. Unless your name is Serge Gainsbourg (who jumped in headfirst wherever his muse happened to lead him, bending whole genres to his will and overpowering them with his personality), it's best to not force it, and let things happen naturally.

Given his first album was a collection of folky, singer-songwriterly musings and Sebadoh-inspired, bedroom-recorded alternative rockers, I was a little dubious at first of this second effort from Michigan-gone-New York composer/multi-instrumentalist Sufjan Stevens (who sometimes sits in with the Danielson Famile during their live shows). Enjoy Your Rabbit is a collection of electronic compositions, so my first impression was that it was the work of someone who just happened to have access to high-end software, some extra time on his hands, and a desire to see if he could stir up some TV commercial work-- all of which might be correct, but all questions of authenticity and motivations faded from memory about two minutes into the album. Such concerns are rendered trivial when confronted with such a fully realized piece of work.

An IDM song-cycle based on Chinese astrological symbols-- or as the liner notes put it, "programmatic songs for the animals of the Chinese Zodiac"-- Enjoy Your Rabbit explores a wide palette of electronic textures using few external samples.

After a brief introductory track, we're hit with "Year of the Monkey," which uses what sounds like a hyper-modified Atari battling a supped-up Colecovision in a chess match/battle royal. Microchips fly everywhere as a thunderous, crashing piledriver of a beat smashes them both to bits. Like its namesake, it's playfully mischievous, with a hint of violence always lurking nearby.

"Year of the Rat" follows, starting like a classic Eno piece before squalling feedback undercuts the theme while the song turns into background music for the next Toy Story movie and returns to its introductory theme. "Year of the Boar" is frantic with its pin-sharp wind-chime notes scattering across an organic bongo beat, and ending in an ascending faux-guitar solo coda. With "Year of the Tiger," a human voice pops up for the first time atop the sound of circuitry covering the earth like kudzu, ending in an aggressive death rattle. By contrast, "Year of the Snake" is almost hymnal with its organ drone, but for the recoiling flashes of short-circuitry and sing-songy bells near the end.

The standout track comes with "Year of the Dragon." At 9\xBD minutes, Stevens gives himself some room to stretch out. If the other songs have a fault, it's that they cram to much into such small containers. Here, Stevens allows a marching beat to hang around long enough for him to weave in a subtle, yet soaring soundscape. "Enjoy Your Rabbit" (replacing the expected title of "Year of the Rabbit") is the most conventionally song-oriented track, with a distorted guitar melody line leading much of the way, and even what could be called a recurrent riff. Elsewhere, the rubbery and fluid "Year of the Dog" sounds inspired by 70s Stevie Wonder and other bouncy funk; "Year of the Horse" rounds out the zodiac with a long piano-driven romp through futuristic gothic architecture; and the album final track, "Year of Our Lord," closes the record with ambient meditation.

Taken in one lump dose, Enjoy Your Rabbit can be a bit intimidating as it's almost 80 minutes long, and at times it does sound like electronica-for-entry-level-listeners due to its sheer breadth of styles. But Sufjan Stevens proves himself adept of both long and short forms; downtempo and high BPM; glitches, scratches and ambient drones; blips, bleeps and bloops. I'm looking forward to seeing where he goes from here.