Sufjan Stevens - Enjoy Your Rabbit

Sufjan Stevens' second release, Enjoy Your Rabbit, is a vast departure from the pan-ethnic folk of his debut. Using almost no exterior samples, Stevens crafts an electronic, all-"instrumental" song cycle based on the symbols of the Chinese zodiac. While working within these considerably narrower confines, he still maps out a wide musical territory by using each symbol as a mode, each one exploring different textures and tempos and, in the process, evoking a surprising array of moods. At times eerie and ominous like a backwoods Autechre, other times sounding like more club-oriented fare, Stevens sometimes trades in bloops and bleeps for oblique glitches and crackles, but the underlying guiding principle is wide-eyed exploration that fills nearly every track with a sense of playfulness.

RIYL Joanna Newsom, Fleet Foxes, Mount Eerie  

Tracklisting

1. Year of the Asthmatic Cat
2. Year of the Monkey
3. Year of the Rat
4. Year of the Ox
5. Year of the Boar
6. Year of the Tiger
7. Year of the Snake
8. Year of the Sheep
9. Year of the Rooster
10. Year of the Dragon
11. Enjoy Your Rabbit
12. Year of the Dog
13. Year of the Horse
14. Year of our Lord