CD OF THE WEEK: Joanna Newsom, "Ys"

Joanna Newsom

“Ys”

(Drag City)

5 Stars



Joanna Newsom belongs to that select group of musicians about whom it is impossible to be neutral: you either love her or you hate her.

Her debut, “The Milk-Eyed Mender,” divided listeners with its tinkling harp, surreal lyrics, and, above all, Newsom’s lilting, often childlike, voice. “Ys,” her sophomore effort, only accentuates her most challenging qualities—and in doing so achieves perfection.

A mere five songs in length, “Ys” nonetheless stretches to almost an hour. Each song becomes a fairy tale, allowing Newsom to experiment with words in a way her debut album did not. Proving herself a master storyteller, Newsom’s fantastical, erudite vocabulary and haunting imagery are given context in these larger narratives.

In what amounts to an experiment with the boundaries of pop music, Newsom’s unparalleled complexity and imagination serve to weed out the casual or unadventurous while rewarding the faithful; a close parallel would be Captain Beefheart. Indeed, her virtuosic musical composition and her way with words echo that prog-rock godfather, whose songs were similarly otherworldly.

Newsom, whose similarity to Björk was hard to ignore on her debut, now seems to channel a world even further afield. Similarly elfin in appearance, Newsom echoes both the futuristic and the ancient at once, her willingness to look backwards setting her apart from her Icelandic contemporary.

The poetry of all five songs is astonishing. The text is more complex—at least formally—than even Bob Dylan. Where he weaved stories on an intricate but predictable meter, Newsom spins an ever-evolving sequence of rhyme schemes.

In “Emily,” she paints an organic tale of a dying kingdom, and the swoop and pull of the orchestration (arranged by Van Dyke Parks) makes it sound like an apocalyptic dirge from another planet.

“Monkey & Bear” is more in the vein of medieval balladry, its anthropomorphized title characters undertaking an epic journey with lute-like accompaniment. “Sawdust & Diamonds,” on the other hand, has its watery imagery matched by Newsom’s lulling, swirling harp-play.

The 17-minute “Only Skin” invokes Pynchon and Tolkien simultaneously, with its setting impossible to place and Newsom’s word-choice at its evocative peak. “We tramped through the poison oak / heartbroke and inchoate,” she whispers and shrieks at once, in the middle of a song that changes tone, meter, and story repeatedly, and yet remains remarkably cohesive.

It may well be the prevalence of nature imagery, and its inversion, that earns this San Franciscan the tag “Appalachian,” which she shares with Will Oldham, Bill Callahan, and other members of the literary singer-songwriter caste.

What separates her from those male counterparts, however, is her blend of folksy stories with the truly avant-garde, as much a call from outer space as a call from the wilderness.

The tales of “Ys” ring like the stories of a parallel world, memories of a lost world, or the ghost stories of an imaginary kingdom. No song on “Ys” will appear on a mix CD and rightfully so: these songs belong together, like the Chronicles of Narnia, to be enjoyed during a blizzard by those who have time to sink into her haunting voice and labyrinthine melodies.

—Reviewer Henry M. Cowles can be reached at hmcowles@fas.harvard.edu.