mp3: Monkey and Bear

website: http://www.dragcity.com/bands/newsom.html

You get extra points as a musician if you can actually change my mood with your music and make me notice things I wouldn’t have bothered with if the earphones hadn’t been in. So it is, about 3 months after everyone else, I think, that I’ve discovered Joanna Newsom’s Ys and I think I might be somewhat addicted to it. My braidio (brain radio, ahem) is tuned to it all the time, and currently, if we dip in, we hear my mind (unsuccessfully) trying to play back the bit in Emily about how the meteorite is the source of the light and the meteoroid, and the meteor ice. God, it’s a tiny part of the song, but it makes my head turn upside-down. I wasn’t keen on the singing pixie elements, or what I saw as that anyway, from her last album so avoided her, but Ys has completely won me over and now I have to go back and find The Milk-Eyed Mender just to prove to myself whether I was wrong or not to disregard her.
Oh, and the bit about putting all the names of the stars in verse so she could remember them for some reason gave me a little jolt, and I’m not sure if it’s the romantic old man or the bookish child in me, probably both, but it made me fall in love even further.

Monkey and Bear as a single song is so full of ideas and twists, the gorgeous close harmonies at the start lulling me into a 1920s black-and-white cartoon reverie, then suddenly it seems to be alive, lush with colour, with phrases - musical and verbal - suddenly coming out of the greenery and surprising me. It’s simply gorgeous, a mental treat, in a few senses of the word. The wordplay  - Your feast is to the east just a little past the pasture - was always going to get me, I’m a sucker for that, and music like this that rewards your patience, stops you looking for distractions because you want to be inside it and it only, just seems so much richer and worth hanging onto. I had another listen to stuff from the first album yesterday and it still doesn’t grab me in the way this new album seems to - Ys seems to have a breath of life about it that I can’t detect in the first one, and if you’d replaced her with a less distinctive singer, I’m not even sure I’d say it was the same artist that had written the songs. It’s one of those albums I want everyone to listen to, but know most people will hate it. Ahhh. So it even appeals to the indie isolationist in me. Lovely.

Buy.