The Greatest Gift

For Sufjan fans, despite not belonging exclusively to their hero, The Greatest Gift is immensely enjoyable. For anyone not yet sold on the Michigan music-maker, well, you’re in for a treat.

The bottom line with The Greatest Gift is predictable. Big Sufjan fans need it, others probably don’t.

Though too scattered to stand alone, The Greatest Gift adds new dimension to Carrie & Lowell.

The Greatest Gift is a record for those who are already Stevens diehards.

Mainly it conjures a nice place to float, with electronically blessed acoustic flurries falling all around you. The mostly uplifting wavelength it keeps also makes it a nice soundtrack to the holiday season and that's likely no coincidence with Stevens.

The Greatest Gift works best as a companion piece to Carrie & Lowell, a variation that offers a different spin on its themes, but it's also a powerful and absorbing work in its own right, and fans of Stevens' work will appreciate it.

Stripped bare of anything other than Stevens’ voice, a guitar and a slightly imperfect recording, their power and beauty still shine through. The added bells-and-whistles of remixes and alternate versions are an interesting side-note, sure, but still, in the end, lead you back to the original album in all its complex, bruised and beautiful glory.

The Greatest Gift is an appropriate accompaniment to Carrie and Lowell. A simple compilation of oddball tracks, it delivers enough to stand for itself--but is ultimately only really for the enjoyment of Stevens’ long-time fans.

The demos remind you that Stevens doesn't need much more than a guitar and an iPhone to work his magic. [Feb 2018, p.119]

The Greatest Gift may not contain all the insight and manifest artistry of one of Stevens’s studio albums, at the very least, it reasserts his perspicacious understanding of his complex emotions and propensity for self-evaluation.

The remixes mostly offer lush versions festooned with synths, offering a glimpse of how the album might have sounded had Stevens followed a different path in the studio.

The discarded Carrie & Lowell tracks will not disappoint any fans who revere that album and should thus be acquired--independent from the whole album--if need be. As the remixes stand, they’re fairly inoffensive on their own, but will likely not sit well with those who have developed a personal connection to the original cuts.

The grandest of the offcuts, Wallowa Lake Monster, suffers in comparison with the far superior Should Have Known Better, whose melody it briefly shares, but The Hidden River of My Life is a gem