Joanna Newsom, Ys (Drag City)

It was my friend Andrew who introduced me to the music of Joanna Newsom.  He had been given a copy of The Milk Eyed Mender, and finding her voice just too much like hard work, decided to pass on it.  And pass it on to me, figuring I would listen to any old rubbish.  (I think we were en route to see something at the Jazz Café when the transfer took place.  Was it Pharoah Sanders?  The Art Ensemble of Chicago?  Granted, not terribly relevant to this review). 

I listened to it once.  Well, I say once.  It was most likely somewhere been 0.25 and 0.5 times.  Whereupon I cast the offending disc from the machine, cursing this elfin child Kate Bush creature who was trilling offensively from the speakers.  Like Andrew, I had found this oddest of voices an almighty annoyance and a completely impenetrable barrier to my enjoyment of the album.

It was my friend Bruno who reintroduced me to the music of Joanna Newsom.  I had been having this nagging feeling that I’d never really given her a proper chance for quite some time, when he put one of the tracks from The Milk Eyed Mender on a compilation he made.  Nestled amongst tracks by Julie Covington, Vetiver, Scott Walker and Vashti Bunyan was the pedal steel hued “This Side of The Blue”, and after several listens I began to hear through the voice to this beguiling work beneath, like it was a Magic Ear sound painting (just let your ears go out of focus…hear the zebra!).  It all made sense.  Going back to the original album, I found unsurprisingly that I had been missing out on an intoxicating talent.  During “The Book Of Right On” she asks if I want to run with her pack and ride on her back.  By now that was a much more appealing prospect.

So, it is against this background, of having taken around 2 years to get into her last album, that I declare her new album Ys to be less immediate than its predecessor.  Gone is any trace of a three minute conventionally-structured pop song.  In are ambitious fables and multi-section epics, ranging from seven to seventeen minutes in length, with nothing resembling a chorus.   Drag City have been brave to fund such expensive ambition and potential folly; the combined production talent of Steve Albini and Jim O’Rourke, with orchestration by ex-Beach Boys collaborator Van Dyke Parks, can’t have come cheap. 

“The meadowlark and the chim-choo-ree and the sparrow, set to the sky in a flying spree, for the sport over the pharaoh” she begins, and I am reminded of Park’s Beach Boys bust-up trigger from Smile: “Over and over the crow cries uncover the cornfield”.  The voice has been reined in slightly - while still an utterly unique instrument, it is a bit deeper, and a bit less prone to leaping around like a gazelle in a tiny Chelsea studio flat.  As Newsom wanders on through this unreal landscape, passing out her fantastic, cosmic and anthropomorphist lyrics as she goes, Parks’ arrangements scatter rose petals at her feet.  His scores are simultaneously lush and sensitive, highlighting and emphasising the metres and timbres of her voice with strings, flutes, banjo and percussion; adding drama and tension with orchestral flourishes or by dropping out to leave Newsom and her brilliant harping unadorned.

However, as wonderfully executed as it is, Ys is going to be a bit rich for some palates, like a five course meal consisting entirely of huge sticky desserts (although you know what they say – if you can’t stand the sweet, stay out of the kitsch inn).  I’m pretty sweet-toothd right now.  If either of the pack-joining or back-riding offers still stand…

Listen to an mp3 of Emily
Buy the album at Boomkat