"Since 2006's Ys, Newsom's albums have been so conceptually staggering that her simpler debut can seem juvenile by proxy. But it's still obvious why anyone who heard 2004's The Milk-Eyed Mender fell in love. Here, as her rattling harpsichord drives an urgent, anxious account of attraction and rejection, the sweetness of her voice and accompanying spurts of a children's choir make the hurt sting even more."
"17. You Will Not Take My Heart Alive (2015) Performing in Berlin, 2015. Photograph: Stefan Hoederath/Redferns Newsom's narrator manically fights to defy mortality: Beyond recall, you severed all strings / To everyone, and everything, she sings amid shards of harp and distorted organ. The beauty of this song lies in the devastating way she repeats the title, crushed as if by the force of protecting her heart."
"From the monumental triple album Have One on Me, there is slyness in the beauty of Easy, which drains the colour from its beatific scenes of domestic bliss, in bed and fairytale glades, to reveal the strain and indignity of loving someone who resists it. It shifts from gentle piano and strings to something more courtly maybe the forced ritual of love as Newsom gradually makes her pained indignation plain."
Joanna Newsom's work juxtaposes ornate musical arrangements with intense emotional and philosophical concerns. The Divers title track layers cascading strings and piano to examine nested cycles of life and death and the passage of time. Sapokanikan pairs jaunty piano and rambling verses with historical depth and ecstatic existential panic. Early songs like Peach, Plum, Pear use harpsichord, sweet vocals, and children's-choir bursts to render anxious accounts of attraction and rejection. Tracks such as You Will Not Take My Heart Alive dramatize defiance of mortality through repeated, crushing refrains, while Easy reveals indignity and strain beneath domestic scenes via shifting instrumentation.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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