The sheer strangeness of Joanna Newsom’s full-length debut, The Milk-Eyed Mender (Drag City), which arrived in March 2004, was clear from the outset: a striking 22-year-old with a comically high voice fronting dense songs composed and performed on a harp? This is usually not a candidate for indie-rock stardom, but, then again, the likes of Newsom don’t come around every day.
Strangeness aside, Mender’s songs, for the most part, were stunning, melodic confections made more intriguing by the head-spinning lyrics, some in iambic pentameter. “And the mealy worms / In the brine will burn / In a salty pyre / Among the fauns and ferns,” found in the song “Sadie,” is typical of Newsom’s baroque approach. The words, even as they dazzled, couldn’t stall the feeling that, as the album wore down, so did the listener’s ears. And that Newsom’s voice—at times sounding like air rushing out of a helium-filled balloon—is an acquired taste didn’t make things any easier. (Still, The New York Times was enraptured enough to tag Newsom “one of the country’s greatest young singer-songwriters.”)
Now comes the sophomore album, Ys, and instead of offering any concessions to the mainstream—like, say, picking up a guitar—Newsom veers further away. Aided by heavyweights Steve Albini, Van Dyke Parks and former Sonic Youther Jim O’Rourke, Newsom’s harp remains the instrument of focus, though Parks’ orchestral arrangements are a major element.
Ys has five tracks that range in length from 7:17 (“Cosmia”) to 16:53 (“Only Skin”). Anybody who considered The Milk-Eyed Mender a hard listen is going to find Ys an absolute obstacle course, mainly because not one of the songs has a single chorus that repeats (something that isn’t the case with Newsom’s debut). So even the relatively brief “Cosmia” is absent a true hook. Not to mention that the record’s also a vocabulary lesson—here are just a few of the words that crop up: hydrocephalitic, dolorous, swansdown and diluvian. Newsom creates a world where these obscurities don’t sound out of place, but, in the end, it’s a rather cold and closed-off habitat. She seems more interested in watching her intimidating vocabulary explode than telling a story that truly resonates.
For all its quirks, her first record had the heart of a pop artifact. But Ys, hampered by an orchestra that becomes too distracting, shoots for the moon and hits the roof. There’s not much comfort in that, except that Newsom’s so young and blindingly smart that she’s bound to have several more chances.
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