joanna newsom

A Week With Joanna Newsom's "Ys": Day 5

13 November 2006
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Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Amanda Walker
More so than on any of the other tracks of Ys, “Cosmia” is a Van Dyke Parks track and his influence is extremely measurable. His directed bursts and bellows of strings lotion this song of abject loneliness and turn it into an operatic tune, something from a Broadway show, not one that’s going to be played in venues that wristband before you can purchase a six-dollar Miller Lite. Parks rides all of the important sentiments and all of the most pronounced tides valuable to the wilting of a heart with gorgeous, Walt Disney-like “Fantasia” surges that could have accompanied an animated fox hunt, but here served in the debonair capacity to enhance Newsom’s least cryptic lyrics and send them into the empyrean. It seems to be a song of banishment, the character being brought bread and water, but it also sounds to be a classic missing love case where one half of the relationship has gone away either temporarily or permanently. Of the five songs on the record, it’s the most different in the way that it doesn’t have you foaming to figure it out totally. You do want to know what was done to be shunned and snuck in water and bread on a daily basis. It’s a song that doesn’t take as naturally to atmospheric theme and maybe that’s why Van Dyke Parks appears to be so important in this recording, while settling for being a famous contributor to a record pulled off by this beautiful, 24-year-old mastermind almost single-handedly up to this point. This should be on the minds of every critic for record of the year consideration.

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