Joanna Newsom - Divers ((Rock))

Good heavens — five years go by — what
can one do? Dive, listener, knowing that your next hour will be filled with
diversions aplenty: a wheeling circuit of sci-fi sea-shanties and cavalier
ballads, narrated from parts unknown; a family of polysemic song-sets; a
paranomasaic Liederkreis of harmonic sympathies and knotted hierarchies; a
fanfare of brazen puns and martial lullabies, blazing in sorrow and horseplay
and love, in turns symphonic and spare, joined by Mellotrons and Marxophones
and Moogs, clavichords and celestas—and of course the harp, thrumming its
threnodies of circadian invasions and avian irruptions and strange loops of
Shepard-toned resonant-frequencies and something called goddamned
Simulacreage... The music of Divers is a wonder of considered arrangements — a taut line,
threaded with the pearls of passed and passing times...a round, a chant, an
incantation...a ray of light diverted eleven ways, into eleven songs that
striate, in chromatic collusion, their simultaneous arc...a span that takes in
lifetimes, but is immaculately sequenced for telescoped brevity. The music
speeds with dissociative dread over montaged cityscapes; it hoofs with delight
among the collaged quotations and sepia-toned codices of Popular Song; it ambles
its carefree citational course through the public domain and down into the
dustier corners of municipal parks, to lionize infamous airmen and anonymous
Dutch Masters, to mourn pearl divers and Poorwills, and to elegize the
ineluctable tragedy of relativity — a tragedy of parochial time, anecdotal
time, dubious time... At the center of the mythos and the maelstrom is the
woman. Divers reminds us that Newsom is a melodist, above all — an acolyte of melody and beauty in
form, a crackerjack of emotional truth conveyed with undiluted immediacy. “The
Things I Say” seems a naked admission, after the epic swales of war and peace
that precede it, and yet this sudden moment of piano and voice falls seamlessly
into the flow, buffeted by the haunting winds of a musical saw and
time-slipping reversal at the finish. ...so that, at the aortic confluence of
such a complexity of strings and wires, winking beneath the lacquered layers of
instrumental nacre, biding quietly between the ranges ofrhapsodic
arrangement—including those by Nico Muhly,

• Format Detail: CD mini-LP style
• Internal ID: CD
• Handling Note: **Please allow an additional 72 hours for this item's shipment.**
• Genre: JITRE