Well, it’s a real spectacle, isn’t it? Everybody seems to have an opinion about this record, even (or perhaps especially?) people who haven’t heard it. Or maybe it is only those users of Internet message boards and weblog comments boxes. What is unfortunate, but seemingly inevitable, is that much of that discussion is of the nature of “If you don’t like this record you must be retarded” versus “This is a steaming pile of dung and only a cloth-eared idiot could possibly like it nyah nyah”. Either that, or grown men who should know better find themselves putting a week-old record in the same space reserved for cornerstones like “Astral Weeks” and “Horses”. In short, Joanna Newsom’s new album is a field of discourse distinguished by hyperbole and extreme opinions.
To like Joanna Newsom, first you have to have a Joanna Newsom Moment. Mine came when the Dirty Three, while guest-programming “Rage”, showed a clip of her playing “Sprout and the Bean” from her first album, a song which I had downloaded some months previously, listened to a couple of times, and put on the too-hard pile. But now I watched, transfixed, as the camera circled around this harp-playing waif, as she sang (about who knows what) above, around and beyond the music, which itself was mesmerising. I was hooked.
“Ys” appeared second-hand before me, and I suspect before it had actually been released (a review copy, I presume). Others whose opinions I respect enormously are not convinced. Marcello Carlin has shown his hand early. When, as he has promised, he writes down his reasons they will be cogent and compelling. I imagine that they will to some extent involve a negative comparison with remote corners of his own listening experience such as I have never ventured into, and possibly may not even have ever heard of. (I also predict he will see “Ys” as an affront to the Emily Haines album which, in any other year, would be generating the buzz that "Ys" has generated, but which instead seems to have sunk, unfairly, without much trace. But surely there is room for two albums in one year by gifted and thrilling female composers/performers. “Aerial” was more than enough for last year, admittedly, but in a sense that was two albums anyway.) Why am I speculating about this? Because I genuinely want him, and him in particular, to like this record, or at the very least not to dismiss it lightly.
Me? Well, it seems to me that this is a record beyond rational criticism. Words are not enough, not least because any words you throw at it are dwarfed, reduced to pale imitations of words, by her own finely wrought lyrics. I find that I am unable to have "Ys" on in the background, or even when other people are in the house. It must be mine, and mine alone, in a way that very few records must be: “Tilt”, perhaps. “Music For A New Society”. These are not being held up as same-shelf comparators, just records that work on me in similar ways. There are large swathes of the record that I just don’t get, that may not in fact be “gettable”. But then there are moments, fragments even, of such sudden and shocking beauty that I am so instantly overwhelmed that I must sit down lest I fall over.
As for the words, and this is an album of words, knitted together by dense passages of (frequently gorgeous) music (and I don't buy the argument that Van Dyke Parks has simply taken the money and provided by-numbers "Van Dyke Parks" arrangements; what he does here is just what he does, as was the case in his work on the Chills' sublime "Water Wolves"), well, for my purposes (and, with the possible exception of Dylan, and possibly even then, the words of a song can’t be separated from the song; meanings and so on are based not on what the words say but how they sound, in the same way that I extract “meaning” from, say, the sound of a Hammond B-3, or the echo chamber on a particularly solid dub plate, or the sound of a finger sliding along a steel guitar string; so what she is singing is at once the whole of the album and a small part of the album; I know that doesn’t make much sense, but I’m doing my best) they are close to perfect, whether you call them “poetry”, “lyrics”, or some other category, invented by and for this album alone. Sui generis.
Listening to a live (possibly solo) version of “Emily” I recently acquired, I was able to find the comparison that had eluded me: Captain Beefheart. It wasn’t what I had expected, but I think it works: it’s the way the words and music combine together in such a way that the listener is given no room to move; no breathing space; no respite. I don’t know if anybody else would agree with me, though. Agreement and “Ys” don’t seem to go together.
