Non-Canadian indie supergroup(?) thinks new things, difficult things…

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Alfred Soto: What’s this — Anderson, Bruford Wakeman & Sufjan? No, just a collective known for creating some of the most miserable dude laments of the last 15 years messing around with synths, vocoders and adenoids. “Melancholy” and “Capricorn” appeared at some point before things got symphonic.
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Thomas Inskeep: For its first two minutes, this reminds me of a sped-up version of Isao Tomita’s take on Debussy’s Arabesque No. 1 (famously used as the theme for Jack Horkheimer: Star Hustler, often the last thing aired by PBS stations prior to sign-off in the ’70s and ’80s) — which befits “Saturn”‘s spacey theme. But I certainly didn’t expect to hear Sufjan Stevens singing with heavy Auto-Tune warping his vocals, or for this to become a throbbing Moroder track 2:15 in. For my non-indie-fan money, this is the most interesting music that both Stevens and the National’s Dessner have been involved with.
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Hannah Jocelyn: I’m disappointed in the lack of orchestration, especially considering Bryce Dessner and Nico Muhly are on the list of collaborators, and the melodramatic delivery wasn’t nearly like that in the live videos. “Tell me I’m evil/Tell me I’m not the face of God” seems a little bit proggy and over-the-top for this group of musicians, especially when Bryce’s heady composer side is normally grounded in Matt Berninger’s Berningering. But I do like the trippy, self-serious atmosphere, even if the electronics and vocoder effects are nothing new for Sufy.
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Katherine St Asaph: If we must keep reviving the decade, I far prefer the space-obsessed prog ’70s to the licks-and-leisure-suits ’70s.
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Tim de Reuse: There are little bits and pieces here to love. There’s the wide burst of shimmering distortion that balloons out right when that anemic kick drum gets into gear, or the scraps of emotional strain in Sufjan’s delivery of “Tell me I’m evil/Tell me I’m not the face of God” that survive the hellish vocal processing — just enough to convince you that the people involved with this aren’t completely out of their minds. The other 80% sounds like the obnoxious Europop people would rig to autoplay on joke webpages in 2004.
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Will Adams: “Saturn” orbits around the likes of Moderat and Jon Hopkins (or, more accurately, Jon Hopkins remixing Moderat), its anxious shimmer adding even more uncertainty to the vocal before everything comes crashing down midway through. And like those acts, the rumination on human evil is more a lament than an indictment. Sufjan’s modulated voice bespeaks a self-shame that, given the state of things, hits home.
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Micha Cavaseno: kosmische self-flagellation doesn’t make for enjoyable music, especially when a bunch of people are just really really too into sounding like the exact edge of good and bad Tangerine Dream. But to their credit, the assorted co. of this song decided to make such a pained record sound transcendental and not like self-combustion. The insistence of the right to live has been denied so many times, and to blur the sounds of humanity like this says a lot about our failure to see ourselves in others. I’ll never listen again to a song like this, but no doubt I’ll see its echoes more than I’d care for.
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