Run Rabbit Run

We Say...

Review by Barry Walters

You don't need to know Sufjan Stevens' Enjoy Your Rabbit in order to enjoy Osso's chamber-music reimagining of it, but knowing a little bit about it helps. The second album from the Detroit-born, Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter is, on one level, a catalog aberration: Unlike his largely acoustic and typically lush other offerings, this 2001 disc is entirely instrumental and mostly electronic, complete with digital glitches and moments of cacophonous noise. But like his celebrated Michigan and Illinois albums, Enjoy is a thoroughly conceptual work, one devoted to representing the Sheng Xiao or Chinese Zodiac. Compositions like "Year of the Rat" or "Year of the Snake" musically reference not only the animals being honored but also each of the personality types represented by the Chinese Zodiac's 12 years.

Run Rabbit Run adds another layer of musical analogy. Osso is a New York-based string quartet here playing contemporary classical approximations of Stevens' electronics. This means what you get is a violin imitating a synthesizer mimicking an animal meant to represent people born in particular years. Yes, that's an utterly ridiculous conceit, one that's quintessentially Stevens and makes for esoteric, yet entertaining results. It's a challenge to detect anything particularly ox-like about "Year of the Ox," but its ascending melody, frantic pace, and virtuoso scraping makes for a bold opening. "Enjoy Your Rabbit" is just as explosive, if not at all rabbit-y (unless the bunny in question is Bugs.)

As the set progresses, several tracks like "Year of the Monkey" more closely represent both the corresponding animal and human characteristics, and Osso's musicianship remains audacious throughout. Antony/Grizzly Bear collaborator Nico Muhly contributes a fiery treatment of "Year of the Dragon" that hypnotically builds, drops, and rises again. Although Run mostly dispenses with Enjoy's track order, it ends with the original's closing cut, "Year of Our Lord," a solemn acknowledgment of the composer's religious beliefs faithfully rendered with calm, sustained strokes that contrast sharply with all the previous plucking and slashing. Even in Stevens' whimsical world, certain things are sacred.