Javelin has a lot of moving parts that don’t feel like they’re properly integrated with one another, leaving the listener with an album that doesn’t live up to its potential.
The first two songs on Javelin present the two main difficulties of listening to the album. Stevens has a comfortable voice, but his low-energy, raspy whispering style makes him half enunciate his words. He doesn’t sing loud enough for his lyrics to be intelligible over the instrumental, which is usually a mix of acoustic guitar and strong drums with the occasional appearance of hand percussions, bells, piano, woodwinds, and synth. There’s also a choir that reappears with harmonies. This variety makes the tracks become too crowded to the point where they just sound like noise – it doesn’t feel like Stevens fully capitalizes on the beauty of these instruments through his experimental melodic interludes.
Not to mention, when the listener can hear his lyrics, they’re much more depressing than the instrumental and his tone make them out to be. The words of “Will Anybody Ever Love Me” are as melancholy as the title makes them sound, but the rhythm would have people believe it’s a powerful outburst of emotion. This juxtaposition can work when done right. Unfortunately, this album is not an example of that.
His unchanging tone makes the last two songs, the 8-minute “Shit Talk” and “There’s A World,” a bit difficult to get through without thinking they sound similar to previous tracks.
“So You Are Tired” and “Javelin (To Have And Hold)” are saving graces amid all these issues. They’re more confident with their smaller suite of instruments – piano and acoustic guitar – and when the choir and hand percussion join in around halfway through “So You Are Tired,” they don’t aim to overwhelm the listener. The more graceful tone of the songs also compliments Stevens’s restrained voice a lot better, and the lyrics convey the inner workings of a complex relationship in a way that’s neither too melodramatic nor too emotionally disconnected. It’s a careful balance of elements the rest of the album would have benefited from greatly.
