Original, beautiful, mind-blowing. Perfect.

I want her babies.

 

Listening to Joanna Newsom's Milk Eyed Mender for the first time is a truly surreal experience. The album opens with 'Bridges and Ballons'; a harp cutting out a rhythm that doesn't so much drive, as encourage you on through the song.

The simplicity of the sound is at once strange and comfortable, asking questions of you while at the same time assuring you that the answers are there at your fingertips. This sound and rhythm is soft, beautiful and at the same time forceful, but all the work in the song is done by the vocal power and uniqueness of this wonderful talent.

The importance of her simple rhythm become apparent as her voice soars over them, threatening to break free at the height of their power only to be calmed in a moment. It is perhaps this surety of her vocals, combined with her clear ability to control that makes her music so deeply moving.

Her childlike voice pours out of her with a force that harks back to primitive passion, but at all times this freedom is held fast by the sophistication of her talent. Her music is a two-pronged attack; the soft simplicity of the music underpins the range and ferocity of her voice - swinging from soul-wrenching power to soft toned tenderness.

Her music is in the truest sense of the word, sublime; effecting you deep down in a way that cannot really be explained. As if this was not enough, her lyrics are powerful and wonderful, at times powerfully and beautifully impressionistic, at others clear and razor sharp.

It is hard to be clear as to whether this is poetry put to music or music put to poetry, but it the perfection with which her lyrics and music combine, suggest a far more sophisticated process than that.

Whether just a strong element of an emerging 'new weird america' or a singular talent in her own right, I have no reservations in claiming that Joanna Newsom is a unique talent that I will probably be hailing as a genius for the rest of my days, even if i have to do so alone. I certainly have never heard anything quite like her before.