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Drag City | miroirmagazine.com
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Ys was ranked first in my Top Ten Albums I Wrote About in 2018 list, and was awarded the Golden Quill for Best Album I Wrote About in 2018
"And I watched how the water /
· · ·
"And I watched how the water /
Was kneading so neatly /
Gone treacly /
Nearly slowed to a stop in this heat /
Frenzy coiling flush along the muscles beneath /
Press on me /
We are restless things”
I don’t like to assign scores to music.
It seems churlish to reduce an album to an integer, to compress the complexities of a years-long project to a single digit, in the name of lazy legibility. It seems worse to introduce a decimal point into the equation (here’s looking at you, Pitchfork), as if a more granular score indicates a more statistically nuanced opinion. And it is completely buckwild to assign an actual grade, to imply some sanctimonious pass-fail rubric, to judge an artwork like a five-paragraph high school essay on Macbeth.
How, in a nutshell, dare you boil a feeling down into a mere number?
A good review discusses strengths and weaknesses of the work in question, and since the former almost always eclipses the latter, the reader can feel comfortable making up their own mind, taking into account such peripheral luxuries as their own musical taste.
Fortunately, I don’t do reviews here at the Ramble.
Go listen to Joanna Newsom’s Ys.
(It’s pronounced like ‘geese’ minus the consonant, apparently named for a mythical Breton city swallowed by the sea. An apt title for an album that barely lets you snatch a breath before it drags you under its rippling surface.)
Gone treacly /
Nearly slowed to a stop in this heat /
Frenzy coiling flush along the muscles beneath /
Press on me /
We are restless things”
I don’t like to assign scores to music.
It seems churlish to reduce an album to an integer, to compress the complexities of a years-long project to a single digit, in the name of lazy legibility. It seems worse to introduce a decimal point into the equation (here’s looking at you, Pitchfork), as if a more granular score indicates a more statistically nuanced opinion. And it is completely buckwild to assign an actual grade, to imply some sanctimonious pass-fail rubric, to judge an artwork like a five-paragraph high school essay on Macbeth.
How, in a nutshell, dare you boil a feeling down into a mere number?
A good review discusses strengths and weaknesses of the work in question, and since the former almost always eclipses the latter, the reader can feel comfortable making up their own mind, taking into account such peripheral luxuries as their own musical taste.
Fortunately, I don’t do reviews here at the Ramble.
Go listen to Joanna Newsom’s Ys.
(It’s pronounced like ‘geese’ minus the consonant, apparently named for a mythical Breton city swallowed by the sea. An apt title for an album that barely lets you snatch a breath before it drags you under its rippling surface.)
And don't just listen. Plonk yourself down with a cup of tea, a granola bar and a slide rule.
This is an album of formidable proportions: unlistenable in length, imparsable in density, unbearable in weight and incomprehensible in dimension. Clocking in at just under an hour, Ys comprises only five tracks. These are no mere songs. These are epic poems, fables in the ancient Greek tradition, tales of bravery and honour, meditations on life and death and the vast expanses of grey in between. The shortest exceeds seven minutes, the average nudges eleven, and the longest bucks a fearsome seventeen.
Newsom takes familiar shapes in the palm of her hand and twists them into something new, iterations of interlinked and overlapped squares and circles and triangles spiraling into oblivion, joining strange planes at impossible angles. Follow a thread of riverbed stones and you’ll find them braided to the top of a felten-grey mountain. Climb a sturdy wintry perennial, and you’ll breach a mud-sodden field. Newsom’s tidework tapestries cannot be unraveled. They can barely even be seen.
Such innovative freak-folk arrangements seem to call out for a counterbalanced conservative singer. But there is no flighty, breathy enunciation to be had here, like a smooth soothing Sarah Brightman or a quirksome Joni Mitchell. Newsom squeaks like the rusty hinges of a door, cracking and shrieking in lucid birdsong, completely bypassing the traditions and structures of folk music, even while carrying its principles to their natural conclusions. Her forceful, inelegant enunciation adds a whole other layer of emphasis and meaning to her already sophisticated orchestrations, a line integral recontextualising the sprawling map of Ys. And sprawl it does. Newsom boasts a terrifying fluency, penning simply the most evocative poetry I have ever had the honor to read. It is deeply grounded in intimate physicality, designed carefully to bring pleasure both to the ears that hear it and the lips that carry it.
She is capable of crouching in a single moment, recording it in recursive detail with Attenbroughian appreciation for narrative and context (and with none of his accessibility):
"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"
And she is capable of leaning back and studying the skies:
"And the meteorite's just what causes the light /
And the meteor's how it's perceived /
And the meteoroid's a bone thrown from the void /
That lies quiet and offering to thee"
There is something quintessentially English about Newsom's music, despite the fact that she hails from northern California. Perhaps it is her choice of primary instrument, the sinewed harp, that evokes bucolic vistas of rolling green hills and endless meadows mirrored in roiling grey skies rather than the harsh, withholding landscapes of Appalachia. Perhaps her lavish arrangements suggest an honest approach to excess, while across the pond are prioritised perceptions of and pretentions to frugality. Perhaps her intricately knotted prose invokes the duality of all adult fairytales: innocent, pastoral beauty by day, and by night, cold, lonely dread. Or it might just be the simple fact that her accent traces its ancestry directly to the Irish lilt.
I think the Englishmost among Newsom's myriad talents (that is, the least American of them) is her proficiency at decentralising structures.
Last week, I wrote about Troye Sivan's glittering pop constructions. His skills as an architect are certainly tremendous: the contours of Bloom interlink oblongs and ovals to stylish effect, but are always defined by the familiar vertical whence they sprout. Experiment though they may with function, a core of comforting familiarity is a constant presence.
Newsom is no architect. She is a horticulturalist. And she is an enchantress.
She kneels in the garden. The shade provides shelter from the sweltering sun. Thick braids of flaxen hair wreathe her head, unruly flyaways drifting in the midsummer breeze. Shifts of silk and bone gird her waist, hemmed with mud and spattered with filth. Her fingers reach into the dark earth, tickling roots and caressing stems, learning the colours of all their moods, nurturing every curlicue, cultivating each eccentricity. She coaxes them apart and together again, earning precious knowledge of the bashful keys of the clarinet, the shrewd strings of the viola.
So when Joanna Newsom takes up her own harp and begins to sing, music sprouts and spreads beyond her, unbidden. Music embraces her flourishes and serifs, interlacing her thoughts into splendorous sylvan calligraphy.
Ys is an incantation. Ys commands harmony and melody to creep like ivy across the water.
And this is all just Newsom's inimitable style. We haven't yet touched her substance.
She is fascinated by interiors, not because of what they contain, but more because of the boundaries and borders that define and protect them. Newsom pulls these apart out of sheer curiosity: what happens when these boundaries are violated, these borders crossed? And she delivers her answer with characteristic complexity: madness, beauty, agony.
Ys imagines the firmament between sacred and profane split, the bulkhead between truth and lies ruptured, the skin between day and night torn open. Stars bounce across the pavement like glowing hailstones, invisible pink unicorns thunder silently across the sky, where light and shadow intermingle like oil on water.
If you’re brave enough to join Joanna.
I try to chart a route through 'Only Skin' and get completely lost. The narrator goes spelunking through landscapes on what may or may not be a spiritual quest, accompanied by a mystery man, that much is clear literally if not metaphorically. She saves a baby bird and nurses it back to health, that I can follow. But then the man returns, bringing with him flurries of cherry blossoms and hellfire:
"Then down and down, and down and down, and down and deeper /
Stoke without sound the blameless flames, you endless sleeper /
Through fire below /
And fire above /
And fire within /
Sleep through the things that couldn't have been /
If you hadn't have been"
And Newsom's closing epigraph, presumably intended to illuminate, only embitters a moment of sweetness.
"And if the love of a woman or two, dear /
Couldn't move you to such heights /
Then all I can do /
Is do, my darling, right by you"
I can make out the shape of it, looming above the clouds. But the details escape me. And Joanna, for all her extraordinary literary muscle, cannot commit the blasphemy of dragging the stars down to earth. She can elevate us on a column of braided vines to this rarefied space between spaces. She can invite us to lay a hand on the firmament, to feel its plastic smoothness, to fog it with our breath. But it's up to us to step through. And I don't have the bandwidth to manage it. Not that the promised enlightenment is any improvement.
"Sky seemed a bread-roll soaking in a milk-bowl /
And when the bread broke /
Fell in bricks of wet smoke /
My sleeping heart woke, and my waking heart spoke /
Then there was a silence you took to mean something"
Newsom’s texts are impressively dense, but not oppressively so, and certainly never uninviting. 'Sawdust and Diamonds' takes its title from taxidermy stuffing that makes a macabre appearance in its nightmarish narrative eulogy. This song, this epic, throws up shadows of horror in its wake. Something wider than the horizon is burning. Something is drowning in the unfathomable deep. Something unknowable is taking flight. Maybe it's a puppet, or maybe it's something more. And here, in the midst of all this fear, Newsom allows us a moment of poetry: an oasis of understanding in an ocean of obscurity.
"And the little white dove /
Made with love, made with love /
Made with glue, and a glove, and some pliers /
Swings a low sickle arc from its perch in the dark /
Settle down, settle down, my desire"
And as the harp pulls back into a delicate, melancholic little polyrhythm, Newsom injects a wink of levity.
"Push me back into a tree /
Bind my buttons with salt /
Fill my long ears with bees"
She shows, in addition to her obvious love of language and infatuation with antiquity, a flair for animal imagery. Her work overflows not only with humanity, but bursts with life of all stripes, sparkling in vivid detail: here, cavalries of shelled snails slick onwards; there, squid-ink dyes the dusk to night; somewhere, sibylline sea-cows low predictions and moo prophecies.
Ten minutes of ornate parable are devoted to the tale of ‘Monkey and Bear’, a star-crossed tragedy of resentment and advantage. The protagonists have escaped from the circus, and find themselves on the streets in desperate need of money. Monkey coerces Bear into dancing for hatfuls of coins, the degrading career she thought she’d left behind, promising her that it’s only until they get back on their feet. Until one moonless night, while bathing in the sea-caves, Bear confronts Monkey, and they come to blows.
"First the outside legs of the bear up and fell down in the water, like knobby garters /
Then the outside arms of the bear fell off, as easy as if sloughed from boiled tomatoes /
Lowered in a genteel curtsey, Bear shed the mantle of her diluvian shoulders /
And with a sigh, she allowed the burden of belly to drop, like an apron full of boulders"
So poetic is Newsom’s choreography that I didn’t reach the chilling realisation they were tearing each other apart until I was right in the middle of it.
"Now her coat drags through the water /
Bagging, with a life's worth of hunger, limitless minnows /
In the magnetic embrace, balletic and glacial, of Bear's insatiable shadow /
Left there /
Left there /
When Bear left Bear"
In the end, all comparisons and metaphors are doomed to fail. ‘Unique’ is not a word I throw around, or indeed ever use at all, being somehow both underrated and overused. I almost feel compelled to use it here. I have never experienced anything like Ys — if there were such a thing as a perfect score, Joanna Newsom would have earned hers. I have barely scraped the surface of its secrets. I haven’t at all touched on ‘Cosmia’, the simplest, shortest and most breathlessly beautiful offering of the album, whereon a silent, circling moth, witness of unknown terrors, takes on the mantle of silent protector.
Some secrets are best left for the listener to uncover.
Do you want to pore over Ys like an encyclopedia — slam it down dustily in a dingy corner of a library, leaf through every volume until you know it more intimately than your own hands, fill reams of pages with scribbled notes and sketches and diagrams, nose into every nook, peek into every cranny? Or do you want to let Ys wash over you in all its majesty — to sweep you, unmoored and unresisting, deep into its dark waters, to draw you unto itself and carry you where it wishes?
Either strategy seems to yield results. But you have to stick to one or the other, or you’ll flood the library and then all the books will get all wet and that doesn’t help anyone.
I’m at a loss as to how to wrap up this article. I’ve exhausted my clutch of ten-dollar adjectives and descriptors, which I had already half-drained last week into Troye Sivan’s excellent Bloom. I think the task at hand is as done as it can be — I’ve brought the horse to water, and I hope you'll drink deep.
All that’s left is to note that for all its earthy realism and celestial headiness, and for all their wondrous contradictions, Ys takes time to do some stargazing. Ys takes time to stand below and look up. Ys lets itself be small, lets itself feel overwhelmed, even and especially while overwhelming others. Newsom name-checks the Pleiades, of course, and ‘Monkey and Bear’ is a baroque origin story for Ursa Major, yes, but the stars show up again and again as symbols of distant beauty, of constancy, of dependency.
Far be it from me and my humble blog to assign homework, but if you have the time this, take a moment to read the following passage and just breathe.
What a generous gift Joanna Newsom has bestowed upon us.
Take care with it.
"Pa pointed out to me for the hundredth time tonight /
The way the ladle leads to a dirt-red bullet of light /
Squint skyward and listen /
Loving him, we move within his borders /
Just asterisms in the stars' set order /
We could stand for a century /
Staring, with our heads cocked, in the broad daylight, at this thing /
Joy, landlocked in bodies that don't keep /
Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being"
This is an album of formidable proportions: unlistenable in length, imparsable in density, unbearable in weight and incomprehensible in dimension. Clocking in at just under an hour, Ys comprises only five tracks. These are no mere songs. These are epic poems, fables in the ancient Greek tradition, tales of bravery and honour, meditations on life and death and the vast expanses of grey in between. The shortest exceeds seven minutes, the average nudges eleven, and the longest bucks a fearsome seventeen.
Newsom takes familiar shapes in the palm of her hand and twists them into something new, iterations of interlinked and overlapped squares and circles and triangles spiraling into oblivion, joining strange planes at impossible angles. Follow a thread of riverbed stones and you’ll find them braided to the top of a felten-grey mountain. Climb a sturdy wintry perennial, and you’ll breach a mud-sodden field. Newsom’s tidework tapestries cannot be unraveled. They can barely even be seen.
Such innovative freak-folk arrangements seem to call out for a counterbalanced conservative singer. But there is no flighty, breathy enunciation to be had here, like a smooth soothing Sarah Brightman or a quirksome Joni Mitchell. Newsom squeaks like the rusty hinges of a door, cracking and shrieking in lucid birdsong, completely bypassing the traditions and structures of folk music, even while carrying its principles to their natural conclusions. Her forceful, inelegant enunciation adds a whole other layer of emphasis and meaning to her already sophisticated orchestrations, a line integral recontextualising the sprawling map of Ys. And sprawl it does. Newsom boasts a terrifying fluency, penning simply the most evocative poetry I have ever had the honor to read. It is deeply grounded in intimate physicality, designed carefully to bring pleasure both to the ears that hear it and the lips that carry it.
She is capable of crouching in a single moment, recording it in recursive detail with Attenbroughian appreciation for narrative and context (and with none of his accessibility):
"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"
And she is capable of leaning back and studying the skies:
"And the meteorite's just what causes the light /
And the meteor's how it's perceived /
And the meteoroid's a bone thrown from the void /
That lies quiet and offering to thee"
There is something quintessentially English about Newsom's music, despite the fact that she hails from northern California. Perhaps it is her choice of primary instrument, the sinewed harp, that evokes bucolic vistas of rolling green hills and endless meadows mirrored in roiling grey skies rather than the harsh, withholding landscapes of Appalachia. Perhaps her lavish arrangements suggest an honest approach to excess, while across the pond are prioritised perceptions of and pretentions to frugality. Perhaps her intricately knotted prose invokes the duality of all adult fairytales: innocent, pastoral beauty by day, and by night, cold, lonely dread. Or it might just be the simple fact that her accent traces its ancestry directly to the Irish lilt.
I think the Englishmost among Newsom's myriad talents (that is, the least American of them) is her proficiency at decentralising structures.
Last week, I wrote about Troye Sivan's glittering pop constructions. His skills as an architect are certainly tremendous: the contours of Bloom interlink oblongs and ovals to stylish effect, but are always defined by the familiar vertical whence they sprout. Experiment though they may with function, a core of comforting familiarity is a constant presence.
Newsom is no architect. She is a horticulturalist. And she is an enchantress.
She kneels in the garden. The shade provides shelter from the sweltering sun. Thick braids of flaxen hair wreathe her head, unruly flyaways drifting in the midsummer breeze. Shifts of silk and bone gird her waist, hemmed with mud and spattered with filth. Her fingers reach into the dark earth, tickling roots and caressing stems, learning the colours of all their moods, nurturing every curlicue, cultivating each eccentricity. She coaxes them apart and together again, earning precious knowledge of the bashful keys of the clarinet, the shrewd strings of the viola.
So when Joanna Newsom takes up her own harp and begins to sing, music sprouts and spreads beyond her, unbidden. Music embraces her flourishes and serifs, interlacing her thoughts into splendorous sylvan calligraphy.
Ys is an incantation. Ys commands harmony and melody to creep like ivy across the water.
And this is all just Newsom's inimitable style. We haven't yet touched her substance.
She is fascinated by interiors, not because of what they contain, but more because of the boundaries and borders that define and protect them. Newsom pulls these apart out of sheer curiosity: what happens when these boundaries are violated, these borders crossed? And she delivers her answer with characteristic complexity: madness, beauty, agony.
Ys imagines the firmament between sacred and profane split, the bulkhead between truth and lies ruptured, the skin between day and night torn open. Stars bounce across the pavement like glowing hailstones, invisible pink unicorns thunder silently across the sky, where light and shadow intermingle like oil on water.
If you’re brave enough to join Joanna.
I try to chart a route through 'Only Skin' and get completely lost. The narrator goes spelunking through landscapes on what may or may not be a spiritual quest, accompanied by a mystery man, that much is clear literally if not metaphorically. She saves a baby bird and nurses it back to health, that I can follow. But then the man returns, bringing with him flurries of cherry blossoms and hellfire:
"Then down and down, and down and down, and down and deeper /
Stoke without sound the blameless flames, you endless sleeper /
Through fire below /
And fire above /
And fire within /
Sleep through the things that couldn't have been /
If you hadn't have been"
And Newsom's closing epigraph, presumably intended to illuminate, only embitters a moment of sweetness.
"And if the love of a woman or two, dear /
Couldn't move you to such heights /
Then all I can do /
Is do, my darling, right by you"
I can make out the shape of it, looming above the clouds. But the details escape me. And Joanna, for all her extraordinary literary muscle, cannot commit the blasphemy of dragging the stars down to earth. She can elevate us on a column of braided vines to this rarefied space between spaces. She can invite us to lay a hand on the firmament, to feel its plastic smoothness, to fog it with our breath. But it's up to us to step through. And I don't have the bandwidth to manage it. Not that the promised enlightenment is any improvement.
"Sky seemed a bread-roll soaking in a milk-bowl /
And when the bread broke /
Fell in bricks of wet smoke /
My sleeping heart woke, and my waking heart spoke /
Then there was a silence you took to mean something"
Newsom’s texts are impressively dense, but not oppressively so, and certainly never uninviting. 'Sawdust and Diamonds' takes its title from taxidermy stuffing that makes a macabre appearance in its nightmarish narrative eulogy. This song, this epic, throws up shadows of horror in its wake. Something wider than the horizon is burning. Something is drowning in the unfathomable deep. Something unknowable is taking flight. Maybe it's a puppet, or maybe it's something more. And here, in the midst of all this fear, Newsom allows us a moment of poetry: an oasis of understanding in an ocean of obscurity.
"And the little white dove /
Made with love, made with love /
Made with glue, and a glove, and some pliers /
Swings a low sickle arc from its perch in the dark /
Settle down, settle down, my desire"
And as the harp pulls back into a delicate, melancholic little polyrhythm, Newsom injects a wink of levity.
"Push me back into a tree /
Bind my buttons with salt /
Fill my long ears with bees"
She shows, in addition to her obvious love of language and infatuation with antiquity, a flair for animal imagery. Her work overflows not only with humanity, but bursts with life of all stripes, sparkling in vivid detail: here, cavalries of shelled snails slick onwards; there, squid-ink dyes the dusk to night; somewhere, sibylline sea-cows low predictions and moo prophecies.
Ten minutes of ornate parable are devoted to the tale of ‘Monkey and Bear’, a star-crossed tragedy of resentment and advantage. The protagonists have escaped from the circus, and find themselves on the streets in desperate need of money. Monkey coerces Bear into dancing for hatfuls of coins, the degrading career she thought she’d left behind, promising her that it’s only until they get back on their feet. Until one moonless night, while bathing in the sea-caves, Bear confronts Monkey, and they come to blows.
"First the outside legs of the bear up and fell down in the water, like knobby garters /
Then the outside arms of the bear fell off, as easy as if sloughed from boiled tomatoes /
Lowered in a genteel curtsey, Bear shed the mantle of her diluvian shoulders /
And with a sigh, she allowed the burden of belly to drop, like an apron full of boulders"
So poetic is Newsom’s choreography that I didn’t reach the chilling realisation they were tearing each other apart until I was right in the middle of it.
"Now her coat drags through the water /
Bagging, with a life's worth of hunger, limitless minnows /
In the magnetic embrace, balletic and glacial, of Bear's insatiable shadow /
Left there /
Left there /
When Bear left Bear"
In the end, all comparisons and metaphors are doomed to fail. ‘Unique’ is not a word I throw around, or indeed ever use at all, being somehow both underrated and overused. I almost feel compelled to use it here. I have never experienced anything like Ys — if there were such a thing as a perfect score, Joanna Newsom would have earned hers. I have barely scraped the surface of its secrets. I haven’t at all touched on ‘Cosmia’, the simplest, shortest and most breathlessly beautiful offering of the album, whereon a silent, circling moth, witness of unknown terrors, takes on the mantle of silent protector.
Some secrets are best left for the listener to uncover.
Do you want to pore over Ys like an encyclopedia — slam it down dustily in a dingy corner of a library, leaf through every volume until you know it more intimately than your own hands, fill reams of pages with scribbled notes and sketches and diagrams, nose into every nook, peek into every cranny? Or do you want to let Ys wash over you in all its majesty — to sweep you, unmoored and unresisting, deep into its dark waters, to draw you unto itself and carry you where it wishes?
Either strategy seems to yield results. But you have to stick to one or the other, or you’ll flood the library and then all the books will get all wet and that doesn’t help anyone.
I’m at a loss as to how to wrap up this article. I’ve exhausted my clutch of ten-dollar adjectives and descriptors, which I had already half-drained last week into Troye Sivan’s excellent Bloom. I think the task at hand is as done as it can be — I’ve brought the horse to water, and I hope you'll drink deep.
All that’s left is to note that for all its earthy realism and celestial headiness, and for all their wondrous contradictions, Ys takes time to do some stargazing. Ys takes time to stand below and look up. Ys lets itself be small, lets itself feel overwhelmed, even and especially while overwhelming others. Newsom name-checks the Pleiades, of course, and ‘Monkey and Bear’ is a baroque origin story for Ursa Major, yes, but the stars show up again and again as symbols of distant beauty, of constancy, of dependency.
Far be it from me and my humble blog to assign homework, but if you have the time this, take a moment to read the following passage and just breathe.
What a generous gift Joanna Newsom has bestowed upon us.
Take care with it.
"Pa pointed out to me for the hundredth time tonight /
The way the ladle leads to a dirt-red bullet of light /
Squint skyward and listen /
Loving him, we move within his borders /
Just asterisms in the stars' set order /
We could stand for a century /
Staring, with our heads cocked, in the broad daylight, at this thing /
Joy, landlocked in bodies that don't keep /
Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being"