I hardly need to add to the avalanche of lavish praise heaped upon the new Joanna Newsom album, Ys. I am also going to be the first person to write about it without explaining how to pronounce the album's title.
To keep things a bit brief, I too think it's fantastic. It's one of those rare albums that absolutely blew me away the first time I heard it, and is only getting better with subsequent listens. The links above will provide a good enough summary of the album and its greatness, so I'm not going to spend too much time describing the sound. The songs themselves unfold like a book, and contain a small book's worth of lyrics that will have me and everybody else analyzing months from now.
However, I think for me, what may push it over from "very good" to "fantastic" are the string arrangements by none other than my old pal Van Dyke Parks. As a card-carrying member of Parks' small but feverish cult (ok, I don't literally carry a card), I'm always happy to see Van Dyke turn up anywhere. In fact, I just recently watched a pair of Beach Boys documentaries that feature some interviews with the always-interesting half-hippie-half-beatnik (which I was actually planning on writing about in this space).
Of course, Ys isn't the first time Parks has made significant contributions to somebody else's amazing album, but he's put out a couple of classics himself. His debut, Song Cycle, features a lot of the idiosyncratic orchestral swirls that frequently grace Ys. And where did he go from there? A whole album of calypso music titled Discover America in 1972. Considering 1984's Jump and 1998's live album, Parks seems to resurface with a great album once a decade. Maybe he's getting warmed up for something with Ys. If not, I can still enjoy the rambling brilliance of that album.
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