Kitty's vision

A recent headline in The Atlantic asked, “Can Indie Filmmakers Save Religious Cinema?” The article’s answer, based on such recent films as Calvary and Ida, was an optimistic “maybe.”

The same could be asked about independent musicians and religious pop. If it were, there’d be no better place to start looking for answers than Asthmatic Kitty Records.

Founded 16 years ago by Sufjan Stevens, Asthmatic Kitty is home to 36 acts, several of which have released albums in the past year that considerably raise the label’s profile and cachet.

Taken individually—from Helado Negro’s over-grudgingly hooky electronica (Double Youth) to Lily & Madeleine’s folky oversensitivity to growing up (Fumes and two Acoustic Sessions EPs)—their quirks and obscurantism often seem like ends in themselves and therefore feel tentatively experimental.

Taken as a whole, however, they may be enough like scenes from a single complex film to suggest a unified, if ambiguous, artistic vision.

Exactly how “religious” that vision is intended to be is a persistent issue given interviews like the one that Stevens recently gave to Pitchfork. “I still describe myself as a Christian,” he said, “and my love of God and my relationship with God is fundamental, but its manifestations in my life and the practices of it are constantly changing. I find incredible freedom in my faith.”

Some Christians will wonder whether Stevens confuses freedom with licentiousness. Beneath the lovely acoustic trappings of his new album, Carrie & Lowell, lies a harrowing examination of his troubled relationship with his late, even more troubled mother that includes R-rated language (“No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross”) and imagery (“All of Me Wants All of You”).

And he extends similar creative license to his fellow Asthmatic Kitties. At least one song apiece on both Being by Mozart’s Sister (a.k.a. the Canadian electro-popster Caila Thompson-Hannant) and Decimation Blues by Castanets (a.k.a. the frequently inscrutable singer-songwriter Raymond Raposa) will give some pause. Does Mozart’s Sister’s “Enjoy” really have to detonate an “f-bomb”? And, in declaring the homosexual icon Harvey Milk a “wonderful man,” does Castanets’ “Out for the West” strain the quality of mercy?

Such questions are hardly rhetorical. If the adult fiction of the Christian novelist Andrew Klavan is richer for containing characters who speak and act like fallen creatures in a fallen world, might not the same be said of the musical dramas bearing Stevens’ imprimatur? And if part of what makes Calvary and Ida such strong films is the stumbling of their protagonists under the weight of their crosses, does Asthmatic Kitty not also have the right to include shades of gray in its palette—especially since, in Half-handed Cloud (a.k.a. the amateur Bible scholar and chamber-pop auteur John Ringhofer), it also includes stark blacks and whites?

Like Half-handed Cloud’s previous half-dozen albums, 2014’s Flying Scroll Flight Control sets biblical texts—New Testament epistles in this case, some paraphrased, many verbatim—to whimsical, seemingly improvised melodies that seldom last two minutes and that may number They Might Be Giants, The Association, and Daniel Johnston among their influences.

The cumulative effect is exhilarating, restoring Scripture’s double-edged sharpness to believers who may have grown numb to it and unsheathing it for unbelievers who’ve mistakenly assumed that it’s dull.

As a holy punch line imbedded in the Asthmatic Kitty catalog, Half-handed Cloud goes a long way toward elevating the label’s entire output to a kind of divine comedy.