Album Review Joanna Newsom - Divers

Since her debut ‘The Milk-Eyed Mender,’ Joanna Newsom has been cultivating her outlying aesthetic in fairly drastic leaps and bounds. With roots set fast in Appalachian folk tradition, ‘Y’ saw the Nevada City-born harpist turn from intricate one-level melodies towards discordant, clashing polyrhythms. Typically, Newsom rather eloquently dismissed them as “wanky” at a later date, and swerved the opposite way again on the follow-up; steeped in baroque, gold-hilted grandeur, and painting swirling, sublime seascapes. Though ‘Divers’ is a close relation of Newsom’s previous record ‘Have One On Me,’ it also harks back to the beautiful simplicity of her earliest work. It doesn’t, however, storm off to explore entirely new landscapes with quite the same ferocious tenacity as previous albums. ‘Divers’ instead folds in on itself like a sentient IKEA sofa-bed with a penchant for deconstruction.

‘Sapokanikan’ - the first single from ‘Divers’ - takes its name from the Native American settlement which stood in the spot that we now know as Greenwich Village, New York. Newsom makes pointed reference to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Romantic masterwork ‘Ozymandias,’ - originally written for a sonnet competition - and chucks in the relatively obscure rival entry, by Horace Smith as an opposite. There are paint-covered women glossed over by Picasso, here, too; burial grounds tucked unseen underneath cities, and lovers’ names secretly etched into landscapes by crafty painters. It’s an dizzying journey through legacies, frontiers, and erased creations, Newsom questioning where, why and how “our work might count.”