●●●●○
With her last album, Have One On Me, Joanna Newsom shed the image she had cultivated of herself as just some sort of harp-strumming, flower-adorned trobairitz by placing more emphasis on other instruments, such as piano and brass. It is not surprising then that she has further expanded the scope of her arrangements and instrumentation with her latest effort, Divers. The album made use of several different arrangers, which accounts for the atypically large variation in style from one song to the next. Although this mass incorporation of sounds and ideas may seem overly ambitious, Newsom mostly pulls through with surprising aplomb.
Both the recorder and the harpsichord, common Renaissance instruments, feature prominently throughout the album. In more than one song, Newsom manages to span numerous cultures and five hundred years of musical traditions in the space of a few bars, moving with surprising coherence from recorder to violin to accordion, occasionally punctuated by the Appalachian twangs of a banjo. While some parts of Leaving the City are decidedly thrown off-balance by an unnecessary electric guitar accompaniment, she makes up for this with the apparently ever-increasing maturity and sweetness of her voice.
The album is also punctuated nicely by what, for Newsom, is effectively almost an interlude: The Things I Say is an ethereal lament which uses some of her most direct language to evoke a touching sense of insecurity in the grip of life and love. The fact of its brevity prevents it from becoming too maudlin. What’s always stood out about Joanna Newsom’s music is her ability to inspire in her listeners a sense of wonder at the beauty and purity of the world. In this respect, the album does not disappoint.
Overall, Divers, while not quite a shining revelation, is a nice reminder that there is someone such as Joanna Newsom in the world who continues to prove herself both a growing, permutable artist, and an inspiringly incorrigible innocent.
Divers is currently available to purchase via Drag City Records.
