The Avalanche

Just read a very interesting post on You Ain't No Picasso, expressing (shock) a lack of excitement for Sufjan Stevens' The Avalanche album and suggesting quite reasonably that this could be down to the sheer amount of stuff that he's put out recently.
The "but it's only outtakes!" view does seem sensible in some ways, but I would take further that the problem is the similarity of his music rather than the amount of it. I adored Illinois (it was second in my favourite albums of last year for a reason) but after getting into that quite late on and buying Michigan afterwards I found it very difficult to get that into an album which had quite so much in common. It's pretty much put me off being excited enough to expect anything more than occasional great songs, or even bothering to find enough else for overkill to be the problem for me.
I may be eating my words come the next album proper though, I guess.