Joanna Newsom --- "Ys"
- Thread starter Ivan Polygon
- Start date
sus
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Not a real review just a comment upthread that started all this noncense
sus
Moderator
@148 I.Q. Magical Thinker
I've been thinking more about this album, because I actually don't think it's possible to hate it on reasonable grounds.
If nothing else, it's an hour of Van Dyke Parks string arrangements—some of the best orchestration he's ever done, sound of swooping starlings, bikes of bees. Sad and celebratory, epic and tapestry-like. An aliveness, stigmergic and improvisatory, the characteristic chaos and order of a swarm, like nothing else I've ever heard.
Then you throw on top some very capable harp by a very talented, classically trained harpist, a harp line that continually evolves and changes while maintaining a structure, a structure or form around which the strings can fluid stray.
The music, melodies, and arrangements of the tracks are constantly morphing—for eight, ten, twelve, twenty minutes. Echoes and motifs come back on their own accord, repetition and difference, not the copy-paste verse/chorus structure you get everywhere else.
And there's the vocal, which is where she gets divisive. I don't think there are reasonable grounds on which to claim Newsom's not, at the very least, a thoughtful lyricist. We can just pick the first track of Ys—we can pick the first stanzas of Ys—
It's not just the music that's swarm-like. The whole album is like this lyrically, juxtaposing cosmic scales with the personal, the intimate, the domestic—meteorites crossing the sky for viewers below; mountains born from tectonics and dissolving into dust. The wind that blows the wind chimes, the music it makes. Skipping little stones across the surface of the water. Ripples and ripples, cycles and cycles, the cause and effect of history.
I get that Newsom's voice grates at first listen. Her voice is an acquired taste, and one well-worth the work, because she manages to sound like nobody else has or will, grain and timbre like fingerprints.
I can't imagine that it's the strange vocal timbre that throws people for such a loop, that marshalls hate. I have to think it comes down to... "vibe," persona, aesthetic, whatever you want to call it. Something more identitarian, less like a legitimate aesthetic claim. More a way of preserving self-image. It doesn't have distance, for instance; it's like a Malick movie, it doesn't have a tortoise-shell of detachment; you have to believe in it, and if you do, it leads you to a new world.
mixed_biscuits
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You fucking cunt! Our school was two thirds muslim and hindu and we didn't get no fucking holidays for eid and diwali. Hell even the Jewish population was more than the christians. No Rosh hashana either.