Feaverish

Sufjan Stevens has a new album out, and it’s the best thing I’ve heard in a while. I liked Greetings from Michigan… and Seven Swans, but I love Illinois. His earlier albums were great if you were, say, sharing a bottle of wine after midnight, or blanketed in front of a fire on a rainy Sunday, but Illinois is more upbeat (read: rockin’) and slightly more musically diverse (read: rockin’), and I’ve been listening to it pretty much nonstop since I first heard it.

Anyway, don’t take my word for it:

• Teaching the Indie Kids to Dance Again has an mp3 of “Come On, Feel the Illinoise,” one of my favorites.
• Daily Refill has “Casimir Pulaski Day” for download.
• Get “Jacksonville” at mWorks Studio.
• Stereogum had a post yesterday about the album, with (if I remember correctly) several tracks to download. My porn filter here at work suddenly won’t let me get to the site, though, so I can’t provide an exact link. (But then you wouldn’t be reading this site if you weren’t already adept at trolling the murky depths of the internet.) Here’s the link to the Stereogum post. There are two more songs to download, plus lots of gushy praise.
• Sufjan talks about the album here. (There’s also a bunch of hi-res promo photos and the cover art.)
• If you do end up finding the whole album, you can get the song titles at Pitchfork. You’re gonna want to stretch before filling in those ID3 tags, though. Sample song titles: “To the Workers of the Rockford River Valley Region, I have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament, and it involves shoe string, a lavender garland, and twelve strong women,” “They Are Night Zombies!! They Are Neighbors!! They Have Come Back From the Dead!! Ahhhhh!” and probably my favorite, “Let’s Hear That String Part Again, Because I Don’t Think They Heard It All the Way Out in Bushnell.”
• Update: Hey, MP3s are People Too has one of the best songs from the album, “Chicago,” absolutely free of charge! Download now!