|
|
 |
 |
|
 |
| |
|
| |
Joanna Newsom/ Great Days of Sail
London, ICA
|
Article
written by Ged M
Nov 12, 2004.
|
Great Days of Sail’s set gives you the same feeling as watching someone’s slideshow of places they’ve visited on their American holiday. You know they've been inspired but the second hand experience isn't quite as satisfying. There’s alt.country, blues, tex-mex, Byrds-like jangle, grimy Johnny Cash rock’n’roll and in the corner of every snap is the ghost of Bob Dylan. From song titles to songwriting, his influence permeates everything that GDOS do. It’s only in the intersections, like ‘Rosemary, Take Me Dancing’, that their real sound begins to emerge and those holiday snaps begin to pulse with light and warmth.
In all honesty you wouldn’t think that one woman and a harp could keep 400 people in rapture for 85 minutes. But Joanna Newsom has the audience pindrop-silent during her songs and wildly cheering between them as she plays her unearthly, ethereal, magical, hallucinatory elf-pop. From Appalachian folk to Edward Lear-style chants or her own fantasy folk, it’s the sort of enchantment that shuts out the world until Joanna chooses to reintroduce it with a song about the bad things back home. We’re buoyed on the entire ‘Milk Eyed Mender’ album, until the point where she decides to stop, well beyond the curfew, saying “this will have to be my last; I don’t know any others”, only to return and play a new, half-finished song that’s near perfect in its orchestral effects and tune-strands riffing around each other.
If you thought the album was good, you need to see her live. She has a Kate Bush physicality as her face yawns and stretches animatedly to accommodate all those child-like sounds while her fingers fly across the harp strings, playing low and high at once, fast and slow, drawing out sonorous and giggly notes. Her voice – apparently untrained – is a fabulous instrument. She starts the show, unmiked, on the edge of the stage, singing ‘Yarn and Glue’ acapella. It’s incredible bravery and a sign of the toughness beneath the slight performer making it possible to suspect there’s something of the plausible about her line: “how I would love to gnaw/ gnaw on your bones so white” (‘Swansea’).
This wyrd-folk tag is a nonsense, of course. Joanna simply reconnects us with the part of ourselves that never forgot to marvel at new ideas, kept searching for new words and new sounds, and never learned a sense of shame. Now, harp music might not be the new rock’n’roll but Joanna has made some of the most transcendental and original music of this year, and this live show takes it to another dimension.
Untitled Document
What's your view?
Comment on the Forum
Other
discussions on the SoundsXP forums right now...
Spread the word: Email this article
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
RSS |
Calling
all music fans based in the UK... Do you want your views to be read
by 5000 people a day? Contact 
