Joanna Newsom - Ys
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Free Music Notes for Ys
Free Music Review: One of the year's most amazing and original masterpieces
Hit: 5 Stars
It is the rare album that invites virtually no comparisons with any work that has preceded it, just as Joanna Newsom fills an utterly unique musical niche. By training a classical harpist, most of her collaborations have been with alt-rock figures. Many classify her as a folk performer, but she generally eschews the folk scene to direct her music at indie rockers. For instance, she has been a member of two different alt-rock bands, while YS was recorded by indie rock uber producer Steve Albini, though the strings were arranged by multi-faceted genius Van Dyke Parks and produced by composer Jim O'Rourke. The latter three names alone should gesture at how difficult Newsom's music is to describe.
My first exposure to Joanna Newsom came through her previous solo album, THE MILK-EYED MENDER, which while similar to YS was far less ambitious and epic. YS is to THE MILK-EYED MENDER what Van Morrison's ASTRAL WEEKS was to BLOWIN' YOUR MIND, simultaneously an ambitious expansion of the possibilities in the previous work and an attempt to produce something truly epic and unique. And the comparison to Morris is apt. Although YS contains only five songs, it clocks in at over 50 minutes, but in those 50 minutes there are no instrumental breaks. The only other performer I know who has recorded several songs that were as long as the ones on YS and featured singing through their entire length is Van Morrison. The songs on YS don't sound like "Listen to the Lion," but it might be the closest musical equivalent.
These songs are epic, theatrical, and expansive. And the word "unique" can't be applied too sparingly. The instrumentation alone sets it apart. Newsom's astonishing harp dominates every track, supplemented magnificently with Parks's wonderful strings, but the oddest instruments can sometimes intrude, like the banjo that pops up in "Only Skin" or the Jew's harp in "Cosmia." Some listeners, especially indie rock fans, are going to have a problem with the overall sound. No drums, no guitars, no bass, only occasional keyboards, but a lot of harp and strings. The result isn't something you can dance to. It isn't even something that you can hum to yourself. But the five songs here contain universes of marvelous, quirky, delightful musical ideas.
The lyrics are perfectly suited to the music and are frequently compelling, if not quite as overwhelming as the music. All of the songs are very strong compositions, which is an absolute necessity when an album features only five of them. The one thing that some people have trouble with Joanna Newsom is her voice. I can fully sympathize with this, because it took me a long time to accustom my ears to her singing. Like everything else, her voice is more than a tad different. Some people compare it to a harsher version of Bjork, but while her voice possesses some of the childishness that one sometimes hears in Bjork, some other comparison always seemed to be more apt. To me, she sounds very much like a precocious child attempting to mimic Billie Holliday. Listen to the way she mouths "darling" in "Monkey & Bear" and tell me that doesn't sound like a talented child imitating Lady Blue. It took me quite a while before I actually liked Newsom's voice. It isn't in any traditional sense a good singing voice, but once one accustoms oneself to it, it seems perfectly suited to her music.
This isn't an album for anyone. It is a ferociously sophisticated work. For want of a better term, it might be termed Alt-Folk. I was praising this to my daughter who is in college in another state. She asked what I would compare the album to. I said the closest might be Lorena McKennitt, but in fact she sounds as much like Lorena McKennitt as the latter does to Dead Can Dance, which basically means it is a worthless comparison. If you are an adventurous listener, love exploring something that is truly unique and different, I heartily recommend this album. For me it is one of the musical highlights of the year.
Free Music Review: Five Beautiful Epic Songs from Newsom
Hit: 5 Stars
I usually write reviews for movies but I've been listening to this disc since November and I have yet to get sick of it. I appreciate music as deeply as I do movies but I'm always a bit more apprehensive in asserting any strong opinions about music. To me it seems like a more subjective medium but I'm sure many will disagree. Anyway, Joanna Newsom is a harpist who sings epic folk songs with a voice as equally eclectic as Bjork's but more appropriately contained for her lyrics. The first few times I listened to this album I new immediately that these songs would take some getting used to. They are long and wordy but in time her lyrics come through and she has so much to say. I actually can't even believe Joanna Newsom is real. I'm almost tempted to say that she is some kind of collaboration of talent like some might say of William Shakespeare, but she's not. She is real and she is only in her mid-twenties. Newsom will never be a big star and she obviously doesn't care to be anyway. Her music, as I've described above, is not tailored for mainstream appeal and although the old punk in me might like her for that alone, I actually find her music massively appealing. You might too if you are open to appreciating music like this.
I'm not going to review every track individually because there is a lot to say. However, on an album with just five songs it is quite possible. The first song is probably the most appealing. It is a song called "Emily". It seems nostalgic and is about a loved one (I think her sister?) who chose a different path in life but a path Joanna seems encouraged to understand and appreciate. The only repeated lines, possibly even considered the chorus, are about the differences between a meteor, a meteorite, and a meteoroid. The astrophysics snob in me noticed she has the definitions wrong but perhaps as an outsider to her sister's chosen profession the oversight was intentional. A meteoroid is not the remnant after hitting the Earth, it is just a smaller asteroid already floating in space. Perhaps I'm a hemorrhoid for pointing that out? Regardless, the song is beautiful and says quite a bit in just over ten minutes. Like many of her songs it is bittersweet in some spots but overall absolutely beautiful.
My favorite song on the disc is "Only Skin". It is 17 minutes long but worth it entirely. It is a culmination of experiencing chaos and ruin but finding peace and strength in love through it all. Boy does that sound like a sappy and bombastic mouthful. I can't really put the song's meaning into one sentence of course but it is clearly about a strong relationship and any description I provide won't do her music justice anyway. Joanna's lyrics as a whole seem incredibly mature and are detailed enough that they must be profoundly personal. Her voice in "Only Skin" sounds amazing and the song's climax is in its own way explosive. It is a great piece of music.
Evidently, Newsom has quite a bit of credibility within her genre/sub-genre/indie folk scene. I'm not sure a label can be placed on her style of music. I don't want to call it experimental because it doesn't seem intentionally so, even though it does mix styles in a way I've never heard before. Her music comes off very natural and that is why it is, at least to my ears, as if she he has come from another planet. Like I said earlier, it is unconventional but in the long run it is quite possible that her music consume any listener. I highly recommend not only this album, but in general discovering this artist.
Free Music Review: New Newsom
Hit: 5 Stars
Perhaps the first thing one notices upon a first listen to _Ys_ is how Joanna Newsom has moderated her voice, eschewing the crone like wail prevalent on much of _The Milk Eyed Mender_ in favour of a more subdued, dreamlike approach, only flying off the handle like old at moments of high drama or release of tension in the musical ebb and flow. At first glance, such an approach to this album sounds downright revelatory from Newsom, as her first album was brimming with enough melodic sophistication and quirky charm to promise a devastating commercial success if her voice had more mainstream appeal and her avant-garde, `difficult' tendencies were reigned in.
Followers of the esoteric side of music can rejoice then, even while some bank accounts fail to overflow, for although she has reigned in the voice (displaying a more mature and emotive sound which is actually very welcome), Newsom has thrown the songwriting rulebook out the window in almost every sense here: structurally daring and willfully difficult, even obscure in places, this new record is composed of only five tracks, the longest of which clocks in at a gargantuan 16 minutes, embraces off kilter melodies completely, and features an orchestral backdrop to 4 of the 5 songs, underpinning Joanna and her harp. Whew!
Despite this probably sounding like the negation of all that is true and pure to some, the great strength of Ys is that the daring, ambitious factors in the construction and delivery actually never get in the way of the primal, utterly entrancing magic of the musical content. `Emily' appears out of nowhere, the gentle ebb and flow of Newsom's voice and retrained orchestration giving way to her most beautiful melody (`The meteorite is the source of the light/the meteors just what we see.....') all the while retaining a rippling, hypnotic charm bordering on the mystical, before the main melody returns for the spectacular conclusion.
Even such a grand departure as this hardly prepares the ground for `Monkey and Bear', which sounds like a Russian waltz channeled through an eclectic folk tale- it is deceptively tuneful, gorgeously paced and almost entirely demented. `Only Skin' functions as an album centrepiece, showcasing most of the ideas apparent on the rest of the CD. It mixes orchestration and delightful melodies, multi-tracked vocals and obscure lyrics so gracefully, one barely notices the segmented nature of the piece, with each section seeming to flow from the one preceding and the mighty conclusion drawing all the strands together with aplomb.
This album will certainly have its detractors, as is almost always the case when something so envelope pushing comes along. I think it is a masterpiece, the extension of Newsoms musical vision and bizzare world-view only gaining from the radically altered format. She actually touches on many genres - folk, indie, experimental, even pop- and mixes all her influences to such effect that this record sounds like very little, or even nothing else. Nevertheless, it is entirely convincing, so crystalline, approachable, dense and delicate that embracing it is like penetrating some enchanted realm. I'd imagine this is the kind of emotional response she intended in making this record. One can only wonder, after two records of such easy quality, what she will attempt next.
Free Music Review: An outlier in popular music
Hit: 5 Stars
In the past couple of years, Joanna Newsom has been a well-kept secret. She was known by those who listen to Smog, Devendra Banhart, or the Pleased. You could catch the occasional review of The Milk-Eyed Mender on an alternative music magazine, or a video of her with Devendra, nothing more. Then, this album happened. Pitchfork gave it an outstanding 9.4 review. At the other end of the spectrum, Sasha Frere-Jones, of the New Yorker, wrote a glowing review. She is now a little-understood phenomenon, as the commonplace remarks about her music show, ie.: 1. that her voice [or music] is "an acquired taste"; 2. that she belong to the "Freak Folk" genre; 3. that she uses words like "inchoate" or "sassafras"; 3. that she sounds like Bjork. All of this proves that professional music critics are unimaginative losers, but does not illuminate Newsom's music. It's very hard to recommend an album like this, since it does not sound like anything I've heard. It's definitely not "baroque" like the Amazon official review states. And it's not certainly "freak folk", as Newsom herself repeats over and over. In fact, it's the opposite. While freak folk is repetitive and hypnotic, this music continuously changes melodies and rithmic signatures, and the lyrics require continued attention. Never in her records, concerts or interviews does Newsom sound like a stoned singer or a lovable primitive. She is in full control, like it or not. She openly complains about her voice being "untrained", but it is much richer, flexible and interesting than the often-quoted Bjork, who is inexplicably considered master of vocal technique. Newsom's is the rare case of a educated musician who has truly internalized disparate influences (among them, West African harp tradition, Debussy and Satie, Celtic music, Appalachian folk, Joni Mitchell and Vashti Bunyan, the precision of Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore, but also the sustained story-telling of Robert Frost, and all of the 20th century american confessional poetry), and made them into something completely new, occupying the uneasy space between high and low culture. She rescues ancient words on the verge of oblivion, to evoke images that are both feverish and distant. This song of cycles is the musical equivalent of controlled nuclear fusion. It's a rare event to hear about meteorites and pleaiades with a sense of marvel and no trace of irony, or that "last week our picture window produced a half-word heavy and hollow". Is John Donne one of her ancestors? Did H.W. stop by Nevada City, a few decades ago?
What propels this record is the unerring sense of melody, and its close connection to lyrics that are both rhapsodic and narrative. The rich orchestral arrangements help and make for a distinctive record, but I feel that the record would have been equally good had she been accompanied by her harp alone. Newsom will not age like those second-rate classical pianists and groups repackaging classical influences in their fast-aging pop hits (who can listen to Emerson Lake and Palmer any more, or Tori Amos???). Twenty years from now, this music will be as interesting, ambitious and anachronistic as it is today.
Free Music Review: Sunken cities
Hit: 5 Stars
Joanna Newsom hasn't lost her freakfolk sound. She's just expanded it.
And she strays from conventional freakfolk in her second album, "Ys," by sticking to sprawling, intricate songs that clock in at about ten minutes average, and enhancing her folky sound with... an orchestra. It's a bit like listening to an acid-tripping fairy tell you her life story.
It opens with "Emily," a gentle little ballad that works itself up in a flow of violins. "The meadowlark and the chim-choo-ree and the sparrow/Set to the sky in a flying spree, for the sport over the pharaoh," Newsom warbles. There's a bittersweet note to the hints of loss, but Newsom also fills it with childish wonderment at the world.
Then it's time for interspecies romance in the rippling, meandering story-song "Monkey and Bear," before trickling into "Sawdust and Diamonds." Unlike the shining density of the other songs, this one is stripped down -- it's just a shimmering harp melody, and Newsom crooning softly over it.
Newsom wraps things up nicely in the final two songs. "Only Skin" is a gently expanding ballad that sounds like a medieval song, with an experimental twist. And finally there is "Cosmia," a colourful mishmash of harp, squealing violins, and Bjorkian vocals. "Dry rose petals, red round circles/Frame your eyes, and stain your knuckles..."
Supposedly "Ys" is a loose concept album, about the legendary sunken island -- a bit difference from her Narnian references in her first album. But taken only for itself, "Ys" is a magical experience, as Newsom spins song-stories about pastoral grandeur and magical nature.
Newsom also expands her music in this. Instead of mostly harp, she relies on harp AND strings this time around, and the strings seem to grow as unpredictable and quirky as her harp playing. Her music is completely impossible to predict -- it will trip merrily along, stop, and explode in a swirl of strings, before slipping into a staccato melody. It's enchanting.
It matches her song lyrics, which sound like a hippie Wallace Stevens. Even the most mundane thing can become magical and mysterious here ("Water wet her limbs, fire warms her hair"), and her songs are full of farms, meteroids, rose petals, doves and "milkymoons."
The thing that is hardest to get used to is her voice -- Newsom doesn't have a typical pop voice. She doesn't have a typical folk voice either. Instead, she sounds a bit like a folky Bjork, when she doesn't sound like a stoned pixie at the Renaissance Faire -- she warbles, trills, and occasionally crackles.
"Ys" is as magical as the legends and images that inspire it, and Joanna Newsom has successfully taken her music to the next level. Exquisite.