Monday, January 01, 2007

2006 In Music - Ys

Joanna Newsom - Ys

Wow.

A good album has some catchy melodies or fun lyrics that get stuck in your head. A great album alters your reality so that for that ephemeral period you spending you listening to it, you become lost in another world, another place, and music becomes an experience.

Joanna Newsom’s Ys has that quality. In the first few seconds of “Emily” you become transfixed. Suddenly, as “Cosmia” ends, you snap out of your trance and realize fifty-five minutes have whizzed by. It’s hard to pick a “best song” on this album because they’re all incredible. “Only Skin” must be given special mention, but then so must “Emily” and “Sawdust & Diamonds”. These are all incredible songs filled with cryptic, beautiful images. They feel as if we are walking through Ms. Newsom’s memories. Joy, loss, love, pain. It’s all here.

That a woman singing poetry and playing harp can have this kind of transcendental effect is a testament to the brilliance of the songwriting on this record. These songs flow like streams. No, these are not just songs, but epic poems put to music.

People are calling this an “important” album. What does that mean? Somehow, I don’t think there will be too many bands adding harpists because of Ys. What this album is though, is a surprise. Milk-Eyed Mender is decent, but Ys is incredible. When an artist produces something like this, it shocks people. I think a lot of people felt that Joanna Newsom’s 2006 album would be good, but it was not expected to be incredible. People expected things from the other artists on this list (Decemberists, Flaming Lips, Neko Case, etc), but not Joanna Newsom. In a lot of ways, Ys is this year’s Illinois, another album who’s predecessor showed potential brilliance but that turned out beyond anyone’s expectations.

Ys is the album that, above all others this year, made me say “Wow”. I can’t call if the best album of the year, because any of these five albums could be that, but this is the one that had more of that “X-Factor” than the others did.

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