Ys - review

Joanna Newsom is one of those new artists who people are hyping a lot right now. That's how I saw her before, it's horrible to come across music just through hype. It's awful. Your reactions can get manipulated in perhaps the same way they are when you find yourself hating certain songs for the sole reason that the radio is 'playing them out'. After hearing the same names again and again, you (or at least I) begin to hate those names, and hype is much worse, because you hate them before you've even heard them. So why is it that you haven't heard the music? Well because sometimes Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Pharaoh Sanders, The Doors, George Harrison, Marvin Gaye... and a million other spirits, are enough. They're enough to sustain you. Always will be. All shine on.

Nevertheless I got this album, I downloaded it. Gave it a chance. Put it in and turned it off after a few minutes. I hate to turn off music midway through, I find it disrespectful. When I am in the passenger seat of someone elses car, I cringe when they turn the stereo off so suddenly (upon arriving at their destination) without thinking of what they are interrupting. If I owned a car, God forbid, I would sit and wait for the song to end. For those drivers I know well enough, I will usually stop them before they turn it off, and fade it down slowly with the volume knob. This I turned off though. I wasn't ready to hear such a piercing, screaching voice. It was too loud and sounded somewhat arrogant at first. It was such a different experience, as listening to new kinds of music sometimes is, that I didn't even stop for a second to listen to the words.

It sat there on a burnt CD for some time before I gave it another chance a few weeks later. I knew I had to go back to it, for the simple reason that Dylan became someone I fell in love with just a year or so ago, and his voice was also quite hard to get to grips with at first. I don't know that I'll ever fall in love with this music in the same way. I never got hooked. I found just as many things about 'Ys' that I disliked as those that I liked, which were slowly creeping up on me. Eventually though, the negatives drowned away, in a way that hasn't happened to me for quite some time, so definitively, and suddenly, that first song, Emily, was a must-listen, for the one or two weeks when I travelled across America.

Poetry and harpistry. It's a wonderful album, even though I only really love two songs right now. The other one is Sawdust and Diamonds, which brims with life and opportunity and consciousness and spring and the word YES. I only started to like that one two days ago. Who knows what else I might like? As I've said before, (I believe in this John Coltrane review) experiences like this have to teach us that things are rarely absolute, sincere dislike is rarely permanent, there's no such thing as purely evil people! We shouldn't be so sure of ourselves.

Optimistic streaming scream ends here. Quote from Joanna Newsom begins here:

There is a rusty light on the pines tonight
Sun pouring wine, lord, or marrow,
Into the bones of the birches
And the spires of the churches
Jutting out from the shadows
The yoke, and the axe, and the old smokestacks and the bale and the barrow
And everything sloped like it was dragged from a rope
In the mouth of the south below...

We've seen those mountains kneeling, felten and grey
We thought our very hearts would up and melt away
From the snow in the night time
Just going
And going
And the stirring of wind chimes
In the morning
In the morning
Helps me find my way back in
From the place where I have been.