Drag City
Joanna Newsom : Ys (US,2006)**°°
The package (with embossed details, a detailed painting by Benjamin A.Vierling) and booklet (with real gold still sticking the papers a bit together, complete lyrics, and a glossy photograph of the cover painting showing more depth and detail) is more than amazing. And also with the people invited, this project has been taken as BIG: a complete orchestra, with Van Dyke Parks as a conductor, Jim O’Rouke as mixer, and recording engineer Tim Boyle (for the orchestra) and Steve Albini (for recording Joanna), mastered by Nick Webb at the Abbey Road studios. While Joanna Newsom is known as singer and harpist and songwriter, this still is rather quickly in time beamed into such an ambitious project. It might have been as far back as the ‘70s, since such music received similar production attentions and possibilities.
Joanna has a very specific voice, which sounds most comfortable when she takes time to sing with her own vibrations. On the first track especially however, she sings with more speediness, energising a 'cracky' emotionality to such a degree it becomes not just emotional, but slightly hysterical, reminding me at that stage of a much more hysterical voice, ie Björk. But Joanna Newsom has more in her bag…
The album is hard to get into and get a good overview, while honestly dealing with all the aspects of it. It is much easier to hate some aspects, or to be bewildered by the whole thing, deverting your attention towards pathoming the contexts. Also, what I could say about it in one second, the next moment on the album it can be already entirely different.
The orchestrated ambition is not exactly the most inspirational-logical necessary enrichment of the harp music, and it is also not led by the same composer or composing drive. The orchestrations sound more like a filmic, theatrical condition, uplifting the equally, ambitious girl singer, with free moving relations from rural experiences, into a Renaissance castle and courtyard-like context, in a way like brushed VIP actors are brought into a movie, into the battle fields, everwhere with their babysham’ washed hair, with the right costumes, but not with the inner compactness and dignity in their behaviour and reactions, which for instance a court context requires. At the most forced moments, like on the first track, the orchestrations gives the music a theatrical opera context, with something like an indulged singer, where the acting singer is allowed to sing for a last time before returning to a mental institution. (A really tired-of-it reviewer compared her voice to a "cat in heat"). But, on the other hand, it still is her own music, and she wriggles herself up to the courtyard, and even when she has not a completed story to tell convincingly that she really is the queen of it all, in the end she does succeed to express the whole context as the rightful writer, the poet and expresser, forming a presentation that in the end will become like the portrait being painted.
In older days, in Europe, an artist always was educated thoroughly and in proportions, when building up his expression level. Nowadays, in our time’s perspectives, a public is used to giving a chance to the (uplifted) freak, -on TV and radio from a safe distance-, instead of a technically trained genius directly in front of them, with his own new over the top element in balance. Nowadays, in an American (hero & movie) way, anybody can be uplifted anytime and to every level, with the freedom to express. And perhaps such persons can achieve more, but, much more often, this will be done with some details that are not balanced out, or that are not built up from the bottom of necessity. Even in a Hollywood fashion, with occasions cloaked in velvet, new conditions can be provided, that enrich the core presentation form and real expressions underneath...
Everywhere when Joanna is a bit acclimatized, her expressions sound wonderful. When pushing her expressions, I wished that the arrangements had some extra voices or chorus, to provide the balances needed, with contrasts made complete with for instance baritones and basses, but that did not happen. But it is of course another now-fashion always to keep the singer in the front focus all the time, even when other musical choices could be made. In fact, every effort taken on this album, keeps the core of the singer with her song in front all-the-time, making all other music completely background, as a rich carpet that has taken an incredibly lot of work to weave.
Once the king listener, in his virtual listening castle, accepts to listen more closely to what this girl with her voice capcones has to say, in this slightly unnatural comfortable environment, one must realize she fits in easily. When listening again and again, this might add details of the stories being told, filling up the listening perspectives, just like the details of the painted vision of it all on the cd cover…
(Most reviewers either liked or hated the album, I described a combination of both).
