Editor is too blown away by Claire’s blurb to write a snappy tag.
[Video][Website]
[6.29]
Alex Clifton: How does Sufjan do it? How does he write music that sounds so beautiful and easy? “Mystery of Love” sounds like a Carrie and Lowell outtake with its delicate instrumentation, but it’s better than that. There’s a magic here that’s hard to translate into words–that sense of wonder and awe and pleasure, much like the feeling of someone stroking your arm gently with one finger. Like much of Sufjan’s work, there is a quiet bittersweetness that lingers, the feeling that these good things never last, but the music skitters and swirls so much that it feels like a comfort rather than a detriment. Damn near perfect.
[10]
Tim de Reuse: Sufjan adheres rigidly to the exact same sonic pallet he used on Carrie and Lowell: meek, whisper-soft vocals, rhythmically static backdrop, cottony reverb smothering the whole thing by the end. Heart-baring songs about his dead mother or suicidal ideation worked well in an oppressive stasis, but this more straightforward love song wants to uplift and gets weighed down instead. That’s unfortunate in itself, but as far as love songs go, this wouldn’t have been one of Sufjan’s best no matter the surface presentation; it feels hastily assembled, with no coherent emotional core. “Palisades” was the wonder of summer camp self-exploration, “Futile Devices” was fuzzy domesticity, “Impossible Soul” was a three-act arc in itself, and this is… a concatenation of adorations, the barest hints of narrative, tell-don’t-show.
[4]
Alfred Soto: His song too on the nose, too lacking in subtlety, too detached from sexuality for the finely calibrated Call Me by Your Name, Sufjan Stevens nevertheless creates a breathy, yearning standalone. I mean, the film’s Elio is too smart to say, let alone think, “Woe is me,” to the accompaniment of an arpeggio.
[5]
Scott Mildenhall: “Mystery of Love” sadly has little of Call Me by Your Name‘s best feature — the palpably all-encompassing stimulation of senses in complete communion, of course — but like “Visions of Gideon”, it’s highly suited to its conclusion. Why can’t good things always last? Why does the cliche of Greek love have to lead to the casual discarding of women? Why does Oliver have to be a creep who should know better? Sufjan sounds embattled with at least one of those mysteries; quietly and wondrously. With a superficially dainty imprint, the feeling burrows.
[7]
Ryo Miyauchi: Enveloped in such a fragile riff, each little verse contains a distinct world pertaining to the different cycles of love. I wish Sufjan Stevens would expand each into a full song length; I fall particularly for the bliss written in the first. But isolating the song to a sole moment won’t do the titular subject justice, where the curiosity lies in how love can take many different forms.
[6]
Micha Cavaseno: Incredibly stuffy and full of conceit, you can practically see the exaggerated facials of this song. Perhaps a good way of trying to comprehend the enraptured quality of this song, and its sense of relinquishment… Or perhaps being too mannered for one’s own good. Either way, hardly a satiating experience.
[2]
Claire Biddles: I remember the night we met, sitting outside on your front step with you for two, maybe three hours until the door opened and your friend held out your phone and told you it was your girlfriend on the line, but I kissed you anyway. I remember that kiss better than I remember whole relationships. I remember reading Call Me By Your Name for the first time two years later, freshly torn open by one of our sporadic meetings, and melodramatically thinking “this is me, this is us,” as it described the kind of love that is wholly separated from time and intellectualisation. I remember going to meet you when you visited five years ago, walking around the block, making myself ten minutes late even though I got off work exactly on time. I remember going to a record shop together, you buying All Delighted People by Sufjan Stevens, and me making fun of you because I thought he was too twee for my sophisticated tastes, but I went straight back to the shop after you left to buy the same record, and played the title track on repeat for weeks. I remember the last time I saw you, three years ago, looking back down the platform after you kissed me on the cheek at the station when I left. I remember seeing Call Me By Your Name at a film festival in February, hearing “Mystery of Love” for the first time and feeling like the victim of a cruel cosmic joke: a fictionalised version of “All Delighted People” in the centre of this fictionalised version of my love for you, Sufjan’s twin “what difference does it make?” lines threading the two together. I remember the day this summer when you changed your status on facebook to ‘engaged’ after deleting me from your friends list. I remember last week, dropping my phone on the ground in a faraway country and realising that I couldn’t retrieve any of the numbers, including yours, and breaking down in tears because that was it, you were gone, even the idea of you was gone, and all I could do was stand and cry in a doorway listening to “All Delighted People” and “Mystery of Love” on a loop, thinking about the real version of you, and the fictional versions of us in the film, and the fictional version of you that I embellished in my head for eleven years, gone. I remember everything, and I’m only embarrassing myself by submitting this as my review because it might be my last chance to find you — maybe not now, but years in the future if you see Call Me By Your Name and hear “Mystery of Love” and somehow, impossibly come across this long-forgotten page — and finally have the chance to ask, like Elio in the film: Do you remember me? Do you remember anything at all?
[10]