New Joanna Newsom Album "Ys" Due Nov 14

But, yeah if rubbing in your "superior" knowledge on the subject in a cocky way (and completely missing my point in the process) makes you feel any better about yourself, go ahead.

Album of the Decade

-- Edward III (ehonaue...) (webmail), September 9th, 2006 5:35 PM. (edward iii)(link)

I'm not so sure...

In order of preference:

1) Only Skin ("though we felt the spray of the waves / we decided to stay till the tide rose too far")
2) Cosmia
3) Emily
4) Monkey & Bear
...
5) Sawdust & Diamonds

Yeah, I always skip S&D.

10-04 Toronto, Ontario - Mod Club
10-05 Montreal, Quebec - Ukranian Federation
10-06 Bennington, VT - Bennington College
10-07 Brooklyn, NY - Barge Music (New Yorker Festival)
10-08 Storrs, CT - Von Der Mehden Auditorium

11-08 Chicago, IL - Logan Square Auditorium
11-10 Cleveland, OH - Beachland Ballroom
11-11 Logan Square Auditorium - Chicago, IL
11-13 New York, NY - Webster Hall (early & late shows)
11-14 Somerville, MA - Somerville Theatre
11-16 Philadelphia, PA - First Unitarian Church
11-17 Washington DC - Black Cat
11-18 Greensboro, NC - Gail Brower Huggins Perf. Center
12-03 Portland, OR - Aladdin Theater

I'm going to the release date gig! The Somerville's a converted 1914 movie theatre, supposed to have great acoustics. Very jazzed.

FAUX avant-garde music judged self-indulgent in mainstream publication film at 11

Ithangyew.

If you don't like it, that's fine - I didn't get the memo that says everybody has to like Joanna Newsom, and I'm assuming you didn't either. But applying "meandering" to Ys, the reviewer might as well have said "too many notes" or "I couldn't be arsed to pay attention."

Call it whatever you want, uncommercial, complex, challenging, avant-garde, faux-fairy-wrangling, indie-fuX0r-suX0r-shitbath. But it's not the product of a lack of focus or discipline, and it's not an album that's easily appreciated after a few cursory listens.

In 1994, the RZA was avant-garde - in my book it's got fuckall to do with snobbery and everything to do with innovation.

If you think this records is as easy to market as Britney Spears FINE.

If you think releasing a somewhat less instant & digestible (than her debut) song-suite where every track is around the 10 min+ mark, and is best heard whole is typical Top 40 behaviour...

If you think her voice is in any way "average" and an easy pitch to new listeners...

What is your problem with calling this somewhat "uncommercial"?

avant-garde is a catch-all term for people who are doing shit nobody else is doing. This, ok, I'm fine with I suppose. I'm not a semantics nazi. I just don't want her to get a snobby audience, which is the danger when slapping that term onto her stuff.

Because it's not, by definition. Also, it's an ambiguous term that tells you nothing about the quality of the music, as describing music in terms of its marketability is quite beside the point.

Never said it was as easy to market as anything, but the moment something is put out to be sold, it's commercial (in whatever degree) by nature.

And Tim Ellison, it's quite influenced by Kora playing. You should listen to a CD called "Kora Melodies From The Republic of The Gambia, West Africa" by Alhaji Bai Konte.

Ah, it's just a blunderbuss of vitriol, feel free to ignore me. If reviewers are going to dismiss the album on grounds that it's meandering, it's a sign they haven't taken the time to digest it. Perhaps "avant-garde" was the wrong (loaded) term to use, but it takes a while to digest what she's doing here - that's just a fact, not snobbery.

There's also this anti-intellectual mode people slip into that gets me super-defensive - e.g. "I read Joyce's Ulysses, anybody could write that crap, the emperor's got no clothes, blah, blah." Okay, how about respecting the fact that people experience a depth in the work that you're not getting to? You don't have to appreciate it and you don't have to work to appreciate it, but some things are complex. There's plenty of music/art/literature I don't "get" but I don't blame the artist (or pretentious fans - yeah they're irritating but what does that have to do with anything?) for my own inability to get it. Momma had a name for people who trash what they can't understand - ignorant. Was she right, or just on some snobbery trip? (P.S. this has nothing to do with you personally, I'm just on a roll now....)

Regardless of all that, I guess what I'm saying is I'm not sure that Rolling Stone is the approriate bellweather of whether this album is any good or not.

There are odd time signatures that are peculiar to African Kora players, as she notes in this interview:

“I’ve spent time with figures transposed from the [African] Kora, where the right hand plays a four beat and the left plays a three, and in between where the two meters cross there is a really strange disorientation and disjunction that immediately upon hearing
I wanted to experiment more with...four against seven, four against nine, just playing with different spots rhythmically.”

Her downplaying it is a bit like The Rolling Stones downplaying the influence of the blues. But I understand her point, she has synthesized a bunch of different traditions and stressing the African influence is not completely accurate. She's not doing world music, aping some other culture's genre. But when you listen to "Bridges and Balloons" and then listen to something like Toumani Diabaté's New Ancient Strings, the affinity is profound.

The strings drown everything to mundanity.

Yeah, but I've come to terms with them over time. Still would love to hear the Albini solo masters, though.

i don't know what i think of this LP now. i think i overpraised it initially.

(not sure if you're responding to me when you say "she's not aping african music" - if you are, I must not have made myself very clear since we agree completely)

At some point when I have a little time I'd like to comment further on this (and on the "small death" lyric). Duty calls, though.