Album Review: Joanna Newsom - "Ys"

I'm sure I've raved and raved about this magnificent record before, but I don't believe I've given it an "official" review. So, for those of you who like form and organisation, here you go.

I believe Joanna Newsom's 2006 release, Ys, to be the best folk album ever produced. Period.

That seems a bold statement, considering one is casting a wide net by using such a broad musical adjective as "folk." How, one may ask, can I take a cadre of musicians that include Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, Townes Van Zandt, Lucinda Williams, etc., and declare this album to be the "best"?

The answer is two-fold: One, it contains the best damned songwriting I have ever heard. Two, it contains some of the most entrancing arrangements ever laid to tape.

To be sure, it's not an easily accessible album - even fans of The Milk-Eyed Mender, Newsom's début LP on the Chicago-based label Drag City, may find it meandering, baffling, and long-winded. Newsom makes many obscure references to ancient European folklore. While that record was full of short, quirky vignettes, there is little structure to the five immensely epic songs that comprise Ys, which range in length from seven to seventeen minutes. They meander to and fro, like a river travelling hundreds of miles through varied terrain.

But what beautiful songs they are, once one becomes acquainted with them! Especially if you are following along with the liner notes in the CD (or, if you are lucky enough to get your hands on it - which I recommend - the LP!), it is immediately obvious that Newsom is a one-of-a-kind poet. From the first track "Emily," which seems a sort of ode to her astrophysicist sister and contains many references to astronomy and cosmology; to "Monkey and Bear," a strange fable of promises and desires and envy; to "Only Skin," a lyrical, soaring song about life and death. She sings, "I have washed a thousand spiders down the drain; / spiders' ghosts hang, soaked and dangling, / silently from all the blooming cherry trees / tiny nooses, safe from everyone; / nothing but a nuisance, gone now, dead and done... / Be a woman, be a woman..."

Newsom's voice still has that croneish tone, though it has certainly matured and mellowed since Milk-Eyed Mender, and every now and then it cracks like a false note on an old fiddle. Her voice remains perhaps one of the more controversial aspects of her work, but I love the contrast it makes with the harp she strums - it keeps that layer of unexpectedness and strangeness about her music. Indeed, it's the strangeness that, perhaps more than anything, makes her music so compelling. We feel somewhat lost, but somehow her songs reassure us with their strangeness.

Last, and certainly not least, are the orchestrations that were written for this album by the legendary Van Dyke Parks. These are not the standard "pop" orchestrations either - Parks knows what he is doing here, and manages to create a truly beautiful, rich, layered, symphonic sound, without undermining the songs they are supporting. They never distract from the overall power of Newsom's words, but carry them deftly and gently, creating a perfectly balanced sound that makes this record sound both epic and intimate. This is a skill that is uncommon even in the best classical and film composers, and Parks shows it masterfully.

A combination of beautiful arrangements and masterful songwriting that amounts to sheer poetry is what makes this album such a gem, and I will be very surprised if it doesn't eventually find its own place in modern folk music history.