Artist: Joanna Newsom
Album: The Milk-Eyed Mender
Genre: Folk
Year: 2004
Country of origin: United States
Tracklisting:
- Bridges and Balloons
- Sprout and the Bean
- The Book of Right-On
- Sadie
- Inflammatory Writ
- This Side of the Blue
- En Gallop
- Cassiopeia
- Peach, Plum, Pear
- Swansea
- Three Little Babes
- Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie
Newsom's wonderfully detailed romanticism ("Your skin is something that I stir into my tea"), homespun wisdom ("Never get so attached to a poem, you forget truth that lacks lyricism"), idiosyncratic flourishes ("See him fashion a cap from a page of Camus"), and insights into the prosaic ("There are some mornings/ When the sky looks like a road") infuse each track with the weightiness of an embroidered travel narrative and a private field-recording.
Showing an appreciation for Appalachian folk and the experimental composer/folksong scholar Ruth Crawford Seeger, her spare arrangements-- harp, Wurlitzer electronic piano, harpsichord, piano, and slide-guitar on two tracks-- unwind like early Homestead oddity, The Supreme Dicks.
Creating avant-garde American music for the back porch, she expands upon tradition without losing authenticity. In this sense, her practice could be linked to Devendra Banhart, a friend and kindred spirit. Both map a pile of eccentricities that tumble together to create something useful, familiar, and nearly sacred.
-Pitchfork
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