Joanna Newsom
Ys

THE REVIEW

Controversial.

Maybe because I'm now accustomed to the often gratuitous and irritating presumption of all those who, not even knowing how to strum "Yesterday" on a guitar, find the audacity to judge the work, the sweat, the talent of others by firing off "useless," or "too ambitious" to describe to the world works of which they have listened only to the first and last two minutes (when they haven’t stopped at the name or the faded colors of the cover); maybe for this reason, listening for the first time to this new chapter in the very early and brilliant career of Joanna Newsom, I find myself deeply struck but also a bit perplexed, a bit dazed...

Deeply struck because these five long compositions of, of... here lies the difficulty in describing in words the complexity of the emotions that these vocal flights of fancy... unleash. Joanna knows how to express herself through these long monologues of the soul, a soul, it has been said and said again, of a "little child" not in its diminished sense of childishness, inexperience, or greenness but that, like the eyes of a child, has the purity and the visions of curiosity, the engine of every discovery, the cause of every surprise. The cause also, therefore, of the falls, the slips that can make the road more arduous but at the same time more fascinating. Joanna lets us discover her world with her travel companion, that harp so exotic in the Rock world, which she handles with a mastery distinctly classical yet never cold and intellectual, constructing the fragile golden structure on which light and clean as a white feather with unpredictable paths, soars in flight the candid and precious voice of Newsom...

A voice that is the desolate Icelandic landscape of Bjork, that often flies to a Japan of paper origami and the simple, clear colors of those naïve illustrations of the eighteenth century, that goes up and down the hills of Hollywood chasing that eternal Joni Mitchell, that to delve instead into her psyche gets help from the introverted but proud Lisa Germano and for the heartfelt intensity of some passages even seems to evoke the most "medieval" spirit of Tim Buckley... But I also felt a vague sense of dizziness; of a lightness, a grace so impalpable that if "forced" even for a moment can lose that extraordinary and enchanting balance they aim for..

And perhaps it happened to Joanna at certain moments of this beautiful album, like when the debt to the other "masters of singing" (she will become one too..), especially Bjork, is still too perceptible... It happened also and above all, in my opinion, due to the often too pronounced presence of the arrangements entrusted to the guru Van Dyke Parks, who did not manage to avoid being intrusive, particularly with the baroque strings so congenial to him; indeed, such a prodigy of voice and inventiveness would need none of these redundant arrangements (I am reminded of Buckley's "Goodbye And Hello") and I hope this will be understood in the future. So after listening to "Ys" just one more time, its controversial nature becomes a virtue, the virtue of the artwork of a very young artist who has a lot of new things to say and plenty of time ahead to do so in the best possible way..

So, always assuming that the score has some significance, the four (and a half) is for me that imperfection, that something more or less of this album that is trust for a (I hope) very soon masterpiece..

Note: I don't know if the album has already been released in Italy; I ordered mine from the Netherlands..