Ys, in European mythology, was a fabulous city built off the rugged Breton coast, that was one day claimed, Atlantis-like, by the waves.
Ys, the 2006 album by Joanna Newsom, never actually references this legendary place, but instead builds its own magnificent architecture, a bustling metropolis of instruments, narratives, allusions, illusions, dense towers of wordplay and domes of keening melodies, which soar above the treacherous seas of emotion, before succumbing, inevitably, to the “gibbering waves”.
This is unbearably pretentious way of describing an album that could have been incredibly pretentious itself, but instead escapes that, thanks to the intelligence and emotional resonance that hums throughout.
Newsom is, without a doubt, a pre-eminent writer of our era, descending from a lineage of American lyrical poets that includes Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop and Allen Ginsberg. Dense, complex rhymes and references overlap and converge, racing from the almost nonsensical:
Awful atoll —
O, incalculable indiscreetness and sorrow!
Bawl bellow:
Sibyl sea-cow, all done up in a bow
Toddle and roll;
Teethe an impalpable bit of leather
While yarrow, heather and hollyhock
Awkwardly molt along the shore
To stark, concrete visions that pierce the mind’s eye with an unerring clarity:
Last week, our picture window
Produced a half-word
Heavy and hollow
Hit by a brown bird
Combined, these phrases all come together to tell hallucinatory stories of grief, love, ageing, and enslaved circus animals. There is very little else like it.
But it’s not just the lyrics. It’s the music too. Newsom is known as a harpist, and it plays a key role here, especially on Sawdust and Diamonds, a somehow intimate ten-minute sprawl which is just Newsom, her harp, and her voice. But on other tracks, the songs swell with an entire orchestra, a complex cacophony of woodwind, brass, timpani and strings that rise and fall around the tales she tells.
The centrepiece of the album is the 17 minutes of Only Skin, a chorus-less narrated symphony that progresses through movements and moods while never stopping giving you goosebumps. It is the bejewelled masterpiece at the heart of a masterpiece, not just one of the best albums of the 21st century, but one of the finest albums of all time. An album that can command your attention for a hundred years:
We could stand for a century
Staring
With our heads cocked
In the broad daylight at this thing
Joy
Landlocked
In bodies that don’t keep
Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being
~ @hip_young_gunslinger
