Album of the Month: Joanna Newsom: Ys (2006)

(OK I know this came out towards the end of last year rather then this year, but I’m on a limited budget and I don’t get given these things for free, you know. And, for the record, had I heard this album before doing my end of year chart, it would certainly be on it.)

Writing about ‘Ys’ seems like an almost pointless task, due to the immediate and incredibly strong reaction she causes in most people on almost first listen. Such is the nature of the record that it inspires in the listener either vitriolic hatred or undying love within the first 20 seconds of hearing it. And there are understandable reasons for being suspicious of Joanna Newsom. Her public image of a twee harp player who sings proggy epics about fairies in a child’s voice does her music no end of harm, smacking a it does of daft gimmickry. But fortunately there is no gimmickry here; the harp just happens to be Newsom’s instrument of choice, an instrument which she plays with the skill of a virtuoso. The ultra-hip collaborators do their bit to boost the record’s cool factor, and the album is indeed recorded beautifully and sensitively by Steve Albini, and provided with a tasteful and complementary orchestral backing by Van Dyke Parks. These collaborators’ contribution is important, but there is no doubt that ‘Ys’ is Joanna’s work through and through. The album is a five song suite that is built around the musical centre of her harp playing and singing. Studying both classical harp and classical composition has provided Newsom with the tools to make this kind of music, but it the strength of her musical vision allows her not to be constrained by them. The music draws from both classical harp music, but also the cosmic folk music of, say, the Incredible String Band and beyond. The individual songs are long and winding, with development through contrasting musical sections, but always with a strong sense of melody and purpose, to the extent that by the second or third listen one finds the album’s many melodies hard to dislodge from one’s head. Just as wide-ranging and expressive are Newsom’s voice and lyrics. Her much maligned voice, once you get past its initial oddness, reveals itself to be a thing of beauty, melodic and full of passion and expression, ranging from soft whispers and gentle coos to the point where it cracks underneath the strain of the emotion behind it. Newsom’s lyrics are full of references to literature and nature, often taking the form of bizarre and cryptic parables. ‘Monkey & Bear’, for instance, is a tale of exploitation and escape, and ‘Emily’ is named after Newsom’s sister. Lines like ‘I wasn’t born of a whistle, or milked from a thistle at twilight / No; I was all horns and thorns, sprung out fully formed, knock-kneed and upright’ will have the faithful guessing for years at their meaning and will irritate and put off further the doubters. But Newsom’s delicate prose and wordiness are not the products of pretension. All her songs are imbued, lyrically and musically, with a deep emotional core. The detail and precision of her music are borne out of an emotional honesty; these are complex emotions, and Newsom refuses to simplify them into pat clichés or bland generalizations; she refuses to sell her music short. The album’s centerpiece, ‘Only Skin’, is an epic with shades of Kate Bush about, among other things, the joys of ‘being a woman’ which covers a staggering amount of musical and emotional ground. Newsom is capable of directness when it is required, too – it doesn’t get much more direct then ‘Stay with me for a while / That’s an awfully real gun’. In fact, ‘Ys’ flies in the face of Joanna’s child-like waif shtick by being very mature music. In today’s musical climate of braindead macho indie rock posturing and emo whining, where glib ‘social realism’ passes for intelligence and apathetic self pity passes for emotion, one would expect the worst type of lazy, misogynistic second rate hacks to start waxing lyrical about women in music as a breath of fresh air, bringing ‘oceanic’ and ‘sensual’ qualities to a hard and masculine music scene. Newsom is able to transcend such lazy clichés by both the strength and boldness of her musical ambition and her determination to realize it. Despite its charming joie de vivre and sense of playful wandering, not a second of ‘Ys’ feels unnecessary or out of place. Joanna’s music seems to pour out of her, creating ‘a moment of almost-unbearable vision / Doubled over with the hunger of lions’. ‘Ys’ is visual, hallucinatory, intoxicating, and, yes, sensual. It makes demands off you that few modern records do: you will have to sit down with it, maybe with the lyric sheet, and listen intently for the full hour. But, in providing a fully realized, utterly engrossing musical and emotional world, it will pay back your attention so much more then most other modern records.