Review by Heather Phares
Yes, the Springsteen-nodding title of Joanna Newsom & the Ys Street Band is witty, but it's fitting, too: Newsom's Ys touring band backs her on this EP, and these three songs have a much more live feel than Van Dyke Parks, Jim O'Rourke, and crew gave that magnificent album in the studio. With a song from Ys, a song from The Milk-Eyed Mender, and a previously unreleased track, Joanna Newsom & the Ys Street Band plays like the past, present, and future of Newsom's music, all given an earthier, less precious feel that still displays how artful her music is. The EP kicks off with "Colleen," a prickly, feral-sounding new song that, with this arrangement anyway, feels brighter and more immediate than Ys' songs, albeit nearly as densely packed with words, melodies, and ideas. "Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie" channels the sunny, avant-Appalachian feel of The Milk-Eyed Mender effortlessly; and in the EP's context, its relatively simple sweetness acts as a palate cleanser between the heavier fare of the more complex songs surrounding it. Joanna Newsom & the Ys Street Band closes with an epic, 13-minute-long version of Ys' final track, "Cosmia"; opening with banjo, clarinets, harp, theremin, and accordion and closing with a string coda that keeps going and going, the song's will o' the wisp moods and movements are just as spellbinding here as they are on Ys, but more intimate and tangible. A beautiful miniature of Newsom's work, Joanna Newsom & the Ys Street Band is a tour souvenir that all her fans can enjoy.
Joanna Newsom
Joanna Newsom & the Ys Street Band EP
[Drag City; 2007]
Rating: 8.7
You have to lower the stakes after an album like Ys, because you can't raise them. Joanna Newsom's follow-up is a lot less formally ambitious: A three-song quickie, with one new song and two old ones, recorded live in the studio with four members of her acoustic touring band. Of course, "less formally ambitious" on Newsom's scale is off the charts on virtually anyone else's. "I was coding a lot of my experience in terms of excess of water," she told Pitchfork last November about the lyrical process that produced Ys, and Ys Street Band-- especially its tremendous new song, "Colleen"-- seems to be conceptual overspill from the album.
"Colleen" is inarguably an excess-of-water song: If I'm reading the handwritten lyric sheet right, it's a sort of Drawing Restraint 9-in-reverse scenario about a woman who's forgotten she used to be a whale, being confronted with the knowledge of her past. (Vivid detail: She's now wearing a corset, which of course would be made of whalebone. A whale in her dream says "What's cinched 'round your waist, Colleen?/ Is that my very own baleen?/ No! Have you forgotten everything?") It may be a way of addressing the kind of Chinese Democracy-style creative block that comes from immersion in making an Important Work: "I tilled and planted, but could not produce/ Not root, nor leaf, nor flower, nor bean; Lord!/ It seemed I overwatered everything."
Too much water again-- and Newsom even line-breaks like a print poet. It's true: She does lead with her lyrics. But she's also an extraordinary and unmistakable tune-maker. Her melodies are Proustian, winding things, so the details of their arrangements and performances signify a lot. Recast without the immense orchestrations of its Ys incarnation, "Cosmia" becomes more intimate, less a framed-and-mounted artifact. And touring seems to have sanded some of the snags off of Newsom's voice; she's singing better here than she has on record before.
The danger of using acoustic instruments is that people may mistake you for a "folk" musician, which Newsom really isn't-- although "Colleen", more than anything else she's written, owes a lot of its lyrical and musical cadences to traditional music of the British Isles. (Remember, "colleen" isn't just a name: Its Irish usage can just mean "girl" or "young woman.") The cadences of her songs and singing have a lineage of which she's well aware; this time, there are faint echoes of Kate Bush and (especially when drummer Neal Morgan harmonizes with her on an excellent remake of The Milk-Eyed Mender's "Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie") Desire-era Bob Dylan, both of whom are similarly well-connected to their own aesthetic roots. But there's nobody else playing Newsom's game right now, and as good as it is that she can produce a varnished marvel like Ys, it's even more heartening to see her moving beyond it this quickly.
-Douglas Wolk, April 23, 2007
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