Joanna Newsom | Divers | Rock

Good heavens — five years go by — what
can one do? Dive, listener, knowing that your next hour will be filled with
diversions aplenty: a wheeling circuit of sci-fi sea-shanties and cavalier
ballads, narrated from parts unknown; a family of polysemic song-sets; a
paranomasaic Liederkreis of harmonic sympathies and knotted hierarchies; a
fanfare of brazen puns and martial lullabies, blazing in sorrow and horseplay
and love, in turns symphonic and spare, joined by Mellotrons and Marxophones
and Moogs, clavichords and celestas—and of course the harp, thrumming its
threnodies of circadian invasions and avian irruptions and strange loops of
Shepard-toned resonant-frequencies and something called goddamned
Simulacreage... The music of Divers is a wonder of
considered arrangements — a taut line, threaded with the pearls of passed and
passing times...a round, a chant, an incantation...a ray of light diverted
eleven ways, into eleven songs that striate, in chromatic collusion, their
simultaneous arc...a span that takes in lifetimes, but is immaculately
sequenced for telescoped brevity. The music speeds with dissociative dread over
montaged cityscapes; it hoofs with delight among the collaged quotations and
sepia-toned codices of Popular Song; it ambles its carefree citational course
through the public domain and down into the dustier corners of municipal parks,
to lionize infamous airmen and anonymous Dutch Masters, to mourn pearl divers
and Poorwills, and to elegize the ineluctable tragedy of relativity — a tragedy
of parochial time, anecdotal time, dubious time... At the center of the mythos
and the maelstrom is the woman. Divers reminds us that Newsom is
a melodist, above all — an acolyte of melody and beauty in form, a crackerjack
of emotional truth conveyed with undiluted immediacy. “The Things I Say” seems
a naked admission, after the epic swales of war and peace that precede it, and
yet this sudden moment of piano and voice falls seamlessly into the flow,
buffeted by the haunting winds of a musical saw and time-slipping reversal at
the finish. ...so that, at the aortic confluence of such a complexity of
strings and wires, winking beneath the lacquered layers of instrumental nacre,
biding quietly between the ranges ofrhapsodic arrangement—including those by Nico Muhly, Ryan Francesconi, Dave
Longstreth, Dan Cantrell,
and Newsom herself — there lies an intimacy seldom achieved, and simply
heard. Divers dives forth with a pure love and respect for the traditions
and mysteries of man, such that we can feel the surge of life itself passing
over our bones as we hear the songs and sounds, the playe

• Handling Note: **Please allow an additional 72 hours for this item's shipment.**
• Internal ID: Cassette
• Format: Rock
• Format Detail: Cassette
• Genre: JITRE
• Released: 10/23/15