[milky moon]

http://www.lostatsea.net/review.phtml?i ... 8780b5d215

Joanna Newsom
Y's
Drag City
Rating: 9/10
December 20, 2006

Joanna Newsom can't be from this era. Everything surrounding Newsom is intriguing; from her aluring, hypnotic voice accompanied by her harp (named Stacey) to her physical beauty, which is just as uncomparable and mystifying. Newsom's latest creation Ys (pronounced "ees" after a mythical city in Brittany) may be only five songs long, but it clocks in at just under an hour. Which suggests that, apart from her storytelling abilities and unique voice, Newsom is a time-traveling spawn of Fiona Apple and the late Will Shakespeare.

Listening to Ys takes a listener back a few hundred years and unveils the world as if, all through recorded history, it had been viewed from too close a perspective. In the world Newsom inhabits, her voice permeates through psychological folk lore with the tickling of a monstrous harp, all the while singing "My heart is a furnace/ full of love that's just and earnest." The listner has no choice but to become lost and found simultaneously in a semi-biblical way. Call it temporary insanity, inspirational epiphany, spontaneous combustion, motivational speaking, or whatever, but like it or not listening to Ys is like dreaming with eyes open, a detached lucidity in which clarity inevitably follows.

In a world of pre-packaged albums from East and West coast production plants, in Ys Joanna Newsom delivers a truthful one-of-a-kind product fashioned from the tattered edges of a lucid dream experienced behind a factory, in a field where a young woman played a harp. Like an acid flashback, the next time you hear Newsom's distinct characteristics and lyrics, you'll kick your feet up, enjoy the ride and know exactly who's driving you.

Reviewed by Josh Mabray