John Mortell’s blog

On my weekend away the only music purchase I made was of the ‘companion’ (for lack of a better term presenting itself) album to Sufjan Stevens ‘Come on feel the Illinoise!’. ‘The Avalanche’ consists of ‘outtakes and extras from the Illinois album’ to quote from the cover. But is it any good?

Well yes, but.

The ‘but’ is that it is the outakes and stuff from the main album are from an album which has to be one of the best albums released in the last few years. Now the outakes are good in themselves but they’re not up to the standard of such tracks as ‘Chicago’ and ‘The man of Metropolis steals our hearts’. In fact there are three different versions of ‘Chicago’ on the album. Even so the versions of the ‘Chicago’ are actually quite good. Also well worth listening to is ‘Springfield, or Bobby got a gladfly caught in his hair’.

‘The Avalanche’ is well worth the purchase anyway, in fact it’s slightly longer that ‘Illinoise’ so even if you (like me) find it’s not quite at the same quality it’s still good value. If I can find a way to put some of the tracks up or some of the video’s on youtube i’ll shove them on.