a a r o n

There aren't really any albums I can truly call growers anymore. It's gotten to the point where I am usually able to tell on first listen whether I will like an album. Sure, many albums grow on me a little over time, and I never put an album up with my favorites after just one listen, I generally know what I will like. But that doesn't apply to Ys, Joanna Newsom's sophomore effort. On first listen, I was entirely nonplussed. I liked moments of her fractured folk, but the whole album seemed just the slightest bit turgid, not to mention that Newsom sounds like a cross between a prepubescent boy and an old woman (often at the same time). But that was the first listen. On the second, I was half asleep, but I could see some of the genius, and by the third, I was hooked. In hindsight, it's not hard to see why I wasn't too huge on it at first. The tracks, to some extent, seem formless. There is very little repetition. The closest the album ever comes to a chorus is the meteor/meteorite/meteoroid section in "Emily," which repeats the melody (but not the words) all of twice, contained within less than two minutes of a twelve-minute song. On the rest of the tracks, there isn't even that. But, for all that does to harm the first listen, it ultimately helps, as every listen is filled with new surprises. Even the surprises you noticed the first few times around keep surprising you, because the direction of the music, while making perfect sense, is terribly difficult to predict. And yet, despite that, this is also one of the most beautiful albums I've heard. Newsom's voice, while clearly an acquired taste, is the perfect conveyor of her fabulously archaic lyrics. The songs are supposedly based on true stories, but you have to dig through layers of metaphors to figure out exactly what Newsom is trying to say. Indeed, while listening, it's hard to parse the lyrics, simply because it's hard to take your ears away from Newsom's lilting voice, the gorgeous acoustic guitar, or Van Dyke Parks' incredible string orchestration. I wish I could be more specific in referencing tracks, but it's nearly impossible to pick out just one section that stands out on this album. It doesn't have any awesome themes to which it triumphantly returns. In fact, it barely even has themes at all. This is a blessing in disguise, however (as is Newsom's voice), as every note, every harmony is as gripping as both the last and the next. You can't hold on to a single theme, perhaps, but you don't need to, because you can hold on to the entire song. Even then, though, it's impossible to pick a single song that stands out, because, as I'm sure you can predict, they all do. Every time I try and think of a single song that sticks most in my mind, I think of "Emily" with its superb section about the differences between meteors, meteorites, and meteoroids (as I mentioned before), but then I think of frantic, clever tale of "Monkey & Bear" or the centerpiece "epic" that is "Only Skin." Ys is easily one of the highlights of 2006, of the entire 2000s decade, and of my entire music collection. I cannot recommend it highly enough. review by Aaron N. — 6-20-08 —

b r a n d o n

Almost a full year after Ys' release, I can comfortably say that it stands proudly among the absolute best albums I have heard not just from 2006, not just from 2000 on, but ever. There. Now you know my feelings. When listening to this album, even now, I am hit with that oh-so-elusive feeling that I'm hearing something totally fresh, unique, challenging, and different. Ys came out of nowhere: Newsom's previous album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, established her as an intriguing talent with a phenomenal skill on harp, an unconventional but strangely alluring singing voice, and mildly interesting compositional abilities that tended towards Appalachian folk but with a certain twist towards the strange and the avant-garde. On this album, though, those compositional abilities are in full bloom and more. Ys consists of five epic-length songs, none of which follow conventional song structures in any way, and all of which twist and turn unpredictably without ever seeming to make any serious missteps. It's very difficult to effectively describe this music, so let me just say this: the first few times I listened, I consistently found myself surprised at Newsom's vocal phrasings and the instrumental swells. They always seem off by a notch — an odd note here, an odd skipped beat there. Newsom's singing is almost meterless; she will smoothly shift from an identifiable pulse into a rapid-fire burst of words and then shift gears just as quickly into a slow, lyrical melody. But even though the unpredictability of her vocals is unnerving at first, she somehow makes it all work, and after a few listens, it becomes apparent how the pieces fit together and how you are, in fact, witnessing something brilliant and unusual. The instrumentation backing Newsom's inimitable voice — which by the way is toned down from the pre-adolescent squeak of The Milk-Eyed Mender but may still be uncomfortably high and a bit overly precious for some folks — includes her harp, of course, but also full string orchestration courtesy of Van Dyke Parks. I was concerned at first that said orchestration was a little over-the-top. Luckily this proved not to be the case, as it's generally quite tasteful. Then, my concern became that it's just a little misplaced, and couldn't keep up with Newsom's all-over-the-map caterwauling. Impressively, this also proved unfounded; at almost every turn, the orchestration serves to complement Newsom's phrasing and emotions rather than conflict with or overwhelm them (particularly on the epic "Only Skin"). This might be the most impressive achievement of the album, in fact. No discussion of this album is complete without some mention of Newsom's lyrics, which are as unusual and strangely alluring as her music. The first track is as representative as any could be: "Emily" is a rambling paean to Newsom's sister, full of vivid, vaguely anachronistic imagery: "Leave your troubles here where the tugboats shear the water from the water/Flanked by furrows, curling back, like a match held up to a newspaper." Or, strikingly, "And, Emily - I saw you last night by the river/I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water/Frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever/In a mud cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky'd been breathing on a mirror." Interestingly, this 12-minute song contains only one section that recurs, and it does so only once, but with such powerful effect that it can only be termed a chorus. This is a consistent trait of the songs on Ys: they are lengthy and chock-full of words, but contain little in the way of refrains or even verses in the conventional sense. The music is unpredictable on both a micro-level and a structural level. For readers of this website, it is another Ys, one recorded some 35 years ago, that probably springs to mind first, but this one deserves an equally high profile among any community of open-minded music fans. I would be surprised if, in another 35 years, this Ys is not considered a lasting, memorable classic. review by Brandon Wu — 10-8-07 —