(Drag City)It’s been some time since Joanna Newsom’s records actually sounded as medieval as her harping. Divers,her fourth album, concerns itself less with totem animals, or rural landscapes and myth,the most easily grasped themes of her first two albums, The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004) and Ys (2006).
Instead, or five years on from 2010’s three-disc gain One on Me,Newsom is wrapping chords and polysyllables around air travel and metaphysics, love and war. You might call Divers Newsom’s Stories From the City, and Stories From the Sea,if that title weren’t already taken (by PJ Harvey), such is the recurring emphasis on water and conurbations. Sapokanikan is named after the Native American settlement on which Greenwich Village now stands. Its narrative arc sees empires plunge, and while its ragtime piano reprises the top-notch-time feel of much of gain One on Me.
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Source: theguardian.com