Sufjan Stevens, "Carrie & Lowell"

Sufjan Stevens

“CARRIE & LOWELL”

Asthmatic Kitty Records

A hushed, intent Sufjan Stevens contemplates death, grief, family and memory on his quietly moving new album, “Carrie & Lowell,” in songs that entwine autobiography and archetype. The music is restrained and meticulous, all graceful melodies, plucked strings and shimmery keyboard tones. But ungovernable circumstances and emotions course through the lyrics.

The album is named after Stevens’ mother, Carrie, who died in 2012, and his stepfather, Lowell, who was married to her for five years as the 1980s began. In a Pitchfork interview, Stevens said Carrie struggled with mental illness and alcoholism, and that when he was a year old, she left her children with their father, Rasjid Stevens.

As a child in the early 1980s, he also spent three summers in Oregon with Carrie and Lowell. Images from those visits, not all of them idyllic, are sprinkled through the songs; “When I was three, three maybe four / She left us at that video store,” he sings in “Should Have Known Better.” Another particular Oregon spirit suffuses the music: the sound of Elliott Smith, a songwriter long associated with Portland.

While the details may come from Stevens’ personal life, the songs face up to universals: grief, guilt, anger, questions of faith, self-destructive impulses, the sense of absence, the sense of finality.

Most of Stevens’ albums have flaunted orchestral reinforcements and electronics. “Carrie & Lowell” is more subdued — it doesn’t use drums — but it is by no means plain. The foreground may be folky guitar or simple, steady chords from a piano, but Stevens places them in a ghostly realm, his own voice overdubbed into a hovering choir, subtle auras of reverb. ON TOUR: June 8 — Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Portland; SOLD OUT; www.portland5.com.

— Jon Pareles,

New York Times