Sufjan Stevens
The BQE
Asthmatic Kitty Records (41m 02s)
Rating: 3/5

It would take someone as idiosyncratic as Sufjan Stevens to attempt to realise a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk through the celebration of one of New York's more reviled civil engineering projects, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The man who we all keep hoping makes an album as endearing as Illinois has made an album about a road in New York City. Commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, this score was premiered live with a 36-piece orchestra (plus five girls doing the hula-hoop) in 2007 and Stevens has since reworked it into an album. Listened to alone, it sounds like a score to a film about a road. I'd prefer to hear Paddy Casey take on the M50.