Joanna Newsom is 22. She's from San Francisco. She plays keyboards in
glam-ish rock-strut outfit The Pleased. But her instrument of choice is
the concert harp. A "Lyon & Healy style 15 harp." On the Nervous Cop
record, a collaboration between Bay Area drummers Greg Saunier (of
damaged/daisy-age savant-pop kittens Deerhoof) and Zach Hill (from
super-tight post-metal guitar/drum duo Hella), her cascading harp is
intermittently strewn through the spastic cut-ups of the pair's buzzing
percussion, like glimpses of angelic visions amidst the duo's sheer
hellish miasma. The harp is also Newsom's
instrument of choice as a solo songwriter, although her most choice instrument
is, far and away, her voice, a throaty call whose screech is pure idiosyncrasy,
a
wail on par with Karen Dalton, or Björk, or Billie Holiday, or any of
those other iconic vocalists you think of as having a voice that is only
their own. Newsom's singing has already led her to keeping company
with Devendra Banhart, Chan Marshall, and Will Oldham; and, in such
company, Newsom transcends the company she keeps, her singing surpassing
any of the vocalized efforts of all of those celebrated songsmiths, her
art seeming beyond the definite defined definitions that can
definitively box in all those lyrical wonders. Plucking at her harp,
singing in such unbearably beautiful tones, it's like her art is coming
quivering from her stomach, dredged up from deep in her guts. And,
rending through the contents of her insides, Newsom doesn't divine the
future, but uses her artistic divination to draw up spirits from the
past, the distance between her modern music and the folk songs of yore
erased the moment she opens her mouth, such enchanted incantation
filling her throat with the voices of countless spirits, intoning
fragments of folk who once sung in their own hallowed tones, as if each
breath she draws draws on history itself. Her own individualist spirit
seems above and beyond prescribed pop-cultural partitions, the sounds of
The Milk-Eyed Mender soaring as they come out of the speakers, seeming
less the frequencies transmitting from digitally-encoded plastic and
more a product of the air they cascade into, of the same caprice as the
dust that swims in it; this sound seems of the breeze, of the trees,
of leaves, earth, sky and light; of the sun; of the God communing only
in the space between it and you. Newsom makes music that is majestic
and magical, laced with spells whose power seems almost unbelievable in
this day and age. Listening to it provokes the most physical reaction
in me; fills me with billowing emotions, thrills me, swells my heart,
makes me feel like bursting, turned to tears by some mixture of joy and
sadness and disbelief and grief and pride and reverence. Like it's just
SO BEAUTIFUL I want to cry because it seems the only reaction that the
music deserves. Like I daren't do anything less. Like just listening,
just loving it, just being enthralled, in thrall to it, trapped by its
truth, frozen by its beauty, lost in its wonder, this doesn't come close
to reciprocity. How else do you respond to something so staggering?
And how do you respond, then, in words, to something so immeasurable
you're hesitant to shame its angel-name by dragging it into the
commodified realm of the record review? How do you make the words
therein evoke something so raw, so rare, so poetic, so profound, so
precious? How do you take her words, quoting Newsom singing "and some
machines are dropped from great heights lovingly/ and some great bellies
ache with many bumblebees/ and they sting so terribly," and convey the
way they come snaking out her mouth, with a trembling tenor that seems
like the hum of her shivering soul, shaking with the power of an
impossible artistry, one barely believable as being contained in but one
person? How can you even try and define the indefinable that makes The
Milk-Eyed Mender seem like, quite possibly, the most amazing recording
you've ever come across? And how do you write that, that which I just
wrote, without seeming like some salivating hack hyperbolizing without
inhibition, even when writing that really seems like it doesn't even
come close to matching the immensity of your feelings?
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