On Songbird Wing
Arriving fully-formed and with no precedent, virtuosic harpist-songwriter Joanna Newsom unexpectedly pirouetted into the pop-cultural canon with her transcendent longplaying debut. Carolling her whooping, trilling caw, the songbird’s intricately-composed, radically-poetic song-stories not only sounded like nothing that’d ever come before, but were blessed with something unquantifiably ‘more’. With fingers dancing across her concert-harp’s many, many strings, the frocked-up folkie pin-up sprinkled a magical form of musical fairy-dust, laced with spells so powerful even the most hardened listener found their heart melting.
When you listen to The Milk-Eyed Mender, what immediately jumps out at you is Newsom's voice, perhaps the strangest, squeakiest wail this side of wartime West Virginian grandmother Texas Gladden. Highly idiosyncratic, it's a trembling wail that ranges from plaintive purring to savage screeching, the multitracked harmonies cast over harpsichord on "Peach, Plum, Pear" pitched somewhere between a shrieking banshee and a hive of bees. It's a voice ferocious and tender, soothing and trilling, sad and ridiculous all at once; the unique sound of a unique soul.
These Are Old Blues
Newsom's voice communicates words that go way beyond the pale of regular popsong penmanship, casually dropping words like "mellifluous" even whilst offering the warning "never get so attached to a poem/ you forget the truth that lacks lyricism." Newsom had studied creative-writing at San Francisco's Mills College, and a cursory lyric-sheet look shows text that's a tangled-up mix of brackets and dashes, repetitious syllables and embedded meaning.
The album's aching closing cut "Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie" culminates in a soaring verse that, in Newsom's transcribing, reads: "Just see me serenaded hourly!/ celebrated sourly!/ and dedicated dourly;/ waltzing with the open sea—/ clam, crab, cockle, cowrie:/ oh, will you just look at me?"
Yet her tremendous voice transcends such punctilious syntax, turning the heavily-punctuated into the heavenly. It's a flighty weapon unto itself, and one that takes The Milk-Eyed Mender to all kinds of magical, mournful places.
