Sitting at the top of my personal list of "Favorite Music Moments" is Björk's legendary appearance on the Oscars' red carpet dressed like a swan. Since then, a diamond-wrapped wrist thrust into a camera lens isn't enough to grab my attention. However, with the recent arrival of Joanna Newsom's sophomore album Ys, Björk's audacity may have a contender.
Before Björk, glamour had nothing in common with feathers and famous ballets. With Ys under her belt, Joanna Newsom is something of a trendsetter herself. Before this harp-plucking pixie's newest release a song was a radio-friendly, three-minute, living-on-a-hook listening experience. Newsom's follow-up to The Milk-Eyed Mender takes her troubadour tendencies to the edge and risks the possibility that her audience will back away. Ys may offend Newsom's audience with tracks not ending before the nine minute mark, may unsettle the anti-poetics with the singer-poet's epic lyrical fables and may turn off strangers to Newsom's child-like warbling with the album's deliberate showcase of her voice.
Unlike how a Swan Lake tutu is considered a fashion masterpiece to some and a mistake in judgment to others, the beauty of Ys is instantly recognizable if you give its five tracks of fifty minutes a good listen.
After listening to Ys, the musical snippets on the radio suddenly sound incomplete and uninspired. Three minutes long with half the time spent waiting for the chorus to chime? Ys's longest track, "Only Skin," is five times this length. A full symphonic orchestra ebbs and flows behind Newsom's signature pedal harp, both violent and gentle under its master's touch. Her voice cuts through every other instrument, showcasing her charm as a storyteller in every lyric -- none of which are ever repeated. She stretches each and every word, singing, "Press on me, / we are restless things. / Webs of seaweed are swaddling. / You call upon the dusk of the / musk of a squid: / shot full of ink, until you sink into your crib." A banjo and an accordion are woven into the track's climax, adding to the symphonic complexity of Ys.
"Monkey & Bear" is a fully formed fairytale narrative (with less of Newsom's lyrical ambiguity as a result), complete with characters and poetic conversation
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