Customer Reviews

Milk-Eyed Mender

5 star:		(80)
4 star:		(33)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(21)

 

 

Joanna Newsom will never find a popular audience. The idea of a classically-trained singing harpist who plays American folk music would pretty much guarantee that, but Newsom's vocals are also an acquired taste-- of the sort that probably causes most fans to endure accusations of just trying to be hip, and not actually enjoying the music.

However, if you take in some of the samples and decide that you find Newsom's voice charming rather than grating, you're in for a special treat. For a young whippersnapper, her music manages to include many sophisticated elements, including a pleasantly reverent, old-timey, Appalachian sound that lingers beneath the atmospheric melodies. The American south that Newsom creates is highly idealized, but never so decrepit or depressing as to be gothic.

The lyrics are as important as the music, and although they can sometimes be frustratingly obscure, they are often disarmingly witty ("like a slow, low-flying turkey/ like a Texan drying jerky"), and even make ironic use of the pretentious academic jargon that seems to have become the lingua franca of 'empowered' college women these days. Yes, it's smart and artsy, but it's also genuinely fresh and engaging. Keep up the good work, Ma'am.

I've just finished scanning most of the reviews to date. We've got those who loved the album from the beginning....like I did. Then there are those that hated it initially but found that it grew on them. Finally, we have those who hate it, find it either some intellectual joke played on them or the worst example of a singer who can't sing they've ever heard.

Like all of us, we can only truly discuss what WE feel....not what others feel, why they feel it and who's fooling whom.

This, to me anyway, is a transcendent album and Newsome is a voice I will not forget. (I know, I know, you detractors won't either!). It's a little girl voice with a big jarring sound coupled with odd phrasing and pronounciation (I mean, M.I.A. IS Sri Lanken, Joanna is American!)

I remember a time when I was still a teen and first heard free jazz. I was bowled over by its harshness but felt some of what has been suggested here. Were they kidding? Was this noise and nothing more? Then, rather slowly, it came to me. It came to me NOT because someone told me I SHOULD like it. It came viscerally. It was almost like pure emotion. The sax would scream, cry, howl, laugh....sometimes all in one piece. I still remember standing in the back of a local club, listening to a great local tenor sax player (Ernie Krivda) moving from a post-bop thing to some free jazz. He literally had me weeping with the emotion of the music he was playing.

As for folk singers, Iris Dement has that quality to her voice. I haven't a clue whether Iris' voice is pure or stylized, just like I haven't a notion about Joanna's either. I DO know that those who like Dylan's phrasing MUST know that his most famous version of his voice WAS "developed". Listen to him on Lay Lady Lay and tell me that the "other" voice we all know was unaffected. Why should we care? Art is art.

Anyway, Joanna's voice has that affect on me. It moves me. Just like Billie Holiday, Aretha, Ronnie Spector, M.I.A., Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, Eryka Badu, Aimee Mann, etc. etc. Some of it is in the songs....whether I truly understand them is like wondering whether I truly understand Dylan....it doesn't matter....the words are as touching as the voice.

For those who despise Newsom, say no more. Find yourself singers more compatible to your sense of vocal style. There are those who love Dylan and Waits as writers...they just hate their voices. For me, that's like saying you enjoy camels except for the humps. There are probably hundreds of people who likewise feel sorry for me because I get nothing from Celine, Whitney and Mariah. Pity me no more.

This is a GREAT, GREAT album from a wonderfully unique new talent and I'll be seeing her live at Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland in a few weeks.

I haven't had as strongly and immediately positive a reaction to an artist in years as I did when I heard some tracks from Joanna Newsom. I thought the only time I would fall so quickly for a quirky artist who can't sing would be that time I first heard Tom Waits playing at a record store years ago, but Newsom's incredibly catchy harp melodies, her unconventional lyrics, and her squeaky-hinge voice combined into something that absolutely knocked me over at first listen. I waited impatiently by the mailbox until I got this CD, with the tunes of singles "Bridges and Balloons" and "The Sprout and the Bean" running almost constantly through my head.

Once I got this album, I found to my relief that Newsom's work is consistent throughout and that it held my attention through repeated listens. Newsom's off-tune, off-kilter voice wears far better than one might expect and her tunes are pop-like in the way they hook themselves into the brain like Velcro. Her lyrics are a double-edged sword on repeat listens in that there is a lot of depth to them - they are more poetry than traditional pop lyric - but some verses (a remarkable minority, actually) are art-student twee.

The good in this album far, far outweighs the occasional pretension in the lyrics. I'm over the moon about Newsom and I listen to this album over and over. I imagine it is true, as other commentators have noted, that Newsom's singing voice, if you can really call it that, could be a stumbling block for many listeners. It usually is for me. But in my opinion, Newsom makes it work.

On first listen I was amazed by this album. How could she be so audacious as to not to attempt (at least) to create a "pretty" sound? When you make an album don't you do everything to make it "pleasing to the ear?" I realized after a few tracks... she doesn't care about that. These are her songs and she does them her way and that's that... take it or leave it. I was, however blown away by the fact that someone would choose not "try to make it pretty." That's guts.

Next the lyrics started to roll over me and through me. Word play, that's what I thought next, and I love word play. Clever snippets of lyrics stayed with me. I found myself going back to the songs for reasons I could not explain other than it pleased me to hear them again.

I read some reviews. I liked a "strangled squirrel" comparison I read. That's not totally off the mark (at certain moments.) I also agreed with comments like "not like anything else you will hear this year." So far, that is certainly true.

On careful listening (headphones, man!) I came to love most of these songs, perhaps it will be all of them eventually. They entertain me and I suspect they are entertaining my soul a bit as well. How much popular music falls into that category?

One rule this album breaks is that popular/folk music is supposed to be pleasing to the ear. They rioted when "The Rite of Spring" debuted. Most of us don't really want to be challenged with anything too new or different and this qualifies.

I enjoyed reading the negative reviews. Certainly, I can understand those who cannot get beyond "the voice." You are forgiven and may go in peace. To those whose expectations were fanned by the New York Times, I am sorry. It is very difficult when high expectations are not met, but it does not make the music bad, it just means it is not to your taste.

I think those who do not like the music are being unfair when they accuse those of us who do like it of only doing so because it is hip or because we have been told to. That's unkind and untrue, at least for most of us.

In Milk-eyed Mender I have found some food for my soul and a set of songs (and a voice!) that on repeated listening have been richly rewarding.

I first heard about Joanna Newsom after reading an interview with her by The Onion AV Club, and was intrigued by the references to her odd singing voice. I managed to find a free download for the video of her song "Sprout and the Bean" (you can too with a bit of googling) and thought the song was sweetly enchanting. Newsom's singing is surprising in that it sounds like the voice of a young girl, but once I got used to it I really enjoyed how the naivete implied by her voice contrasts with the sometimes slyly ironic lyrics. "I killed my dinner with karate / kick 'em in the face, taste the body" is a sublime line to hear with that voice.

To be honest a lot of the lyrics seem pretty abstract to me (or maybe my poetry interpretation skills are terrible), but they're definitely evocative. I'm not always sure of Newsom's intended messages, but in my mind they're ethereal love songs, put-downs to intellectual pretenders and poignant odes to the passing of youth. Also, each song only uses Newsom's voice accompanied by harp (or sometimes piano), but they never sound too spare, just clean and profound. I think she's a hell of a songwriter to pull it off for whole album, sounding like a barefoot girl who dragged her harp down from the mountains to play haunting songs on a street corner for coins. I'm not normally interested in traditional-sounding Americana music like this, but in my mind "Milk-Eyed Mender" is a cousin of the modern bluegrass album Steve Earle's "The Mountain", and also reminds me slightly of the simple but captivating and personal songs on "Bachelor No. 2" by Aimee Mann. If you like those albums, I bet you'll dig "Milk-Eyed Mender" too.

There seems to be a high tide of young, female singer-songwriters rising everywhere, and Joanna Newsom is another wonderful example of it, a young woman making intelligent, daring and emotionally honest music -others I'm thinking of and recommend wholeheartedly are Laura Veirs, from Seattle, Jolie Holland, and UK's own Polly Paulusma.

Newsom, in addition to her abilities as a composer, is an accomplished harpist, which she showcases very appropriately throughout this -her debut- album. To me, at least, it's interesting how an instrument so seldom used sounds so beautifully fitting and gives the songs included here such distinct and soulful touch.

I suggest you think of her as some sort of descendant of Donovan or Vashti Bunyan: someone capable, as those mentioned were, of creating wondrous worlds through her lyrics and enchanting moods with her melodies.

The only element that, I believe, is worth cautioning you about is her voice. At first, at least to some people who reviewed her album, her pitch and phrasing may seem unusual or hard. I too had a similar experience but it was quickly overwhelmed by te spell these songs cast on me.

The best way to describe her voice is to think of the Folk singer Melanie -circa Woodstock- as far as how she sounds may be concerned, and a bit of a female Devendra Banhart when it comes to her phrasing. Alltogether, her voice adds yet more magic to the songs, and at play with her harp, it'll transport you.

Joanna Newsom is another singular new voice coming out of the same talented scene that has given us Devendra Banhart and the group Vetiver, fellow artists hailing from San Francisco and making music just as wonderfully theirs and impressively mature already, as "Milk-Eyed Mender."

Joanna Newsom's "The Milk-Eyed Mender" was a revelation to me on hearing it. Although I have listened to arty female singer/songwriters for a number of years, "The Milk-Eyed Mender" is totally unlike anything in the genre or anywhere else. Newsom might retain the childlike passion of so much of the best music in this genre, but the spin she puts on it is unlike anything I had heard.

The use of the harp as a folk instrument is of itself something unusual. Only in a few songs on The Sensual World had that instrument been heard in a "pop" context ever since the genre emerged. Despite this, Newsom shows that the harp, with its tight strings, has as much potential as a guitar or piano for singer/songwriter music. The opening track, "Bridges and Balloons", begins as a beautiful hum to which Newsom adds some utterly piercing vocals that anyone who listens carefully will admit to have genuine passion and strange beauty. "Sprout and the Bean" is actually even more intense and really funny at the same time: Newsom sounds so like a child who retains remarkably innocence, and her lyrics celebrate wondrous joy that few singer/songwriters (The Roches, Karen Peris or Joy Of Cooking's debut come to mind) ever manage.

"The Book of Right-On" is truly beautful and touching, whilst "Sadie" is even better. Newsom's voice seems to pierce even "harder" without her music losing resonance or even beauty over a full six minutes. "Inflammatroy Writ" shows Newsom could still sound funny, eccentric and delightful without her harp - the rhythm almost sounds like you can dance to it.

"Cassiopeia" is slower than any other track, but this benefits it because one really hears the true twinkle of Newsom's harp to a similar, danceable rhythm to "Inflammtory Writ". The vocal here is a genuine highlight: the song seems much longer than it is. "Peach, Plum, Pear" uses a harpsichord to accompany Newsom's beautful voice - and she plays it so lightly you can hear the rhythm as if it was someone dancing. "Swansea" is a childlike tale of fear with wonderful passion and depth, so that it sounds almost creepy, whilst "Three Little Babes" is a medieval tale played on piano on which Newsom sounds like a choir might if it were pushed to her own level of intensely. Closer "Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie" mainatians the stardard to round off one of the finest debuts in music history. Not in a long time before (nor ever since) have I heard an unknown talent produce such an original, intense, deep, passionate and beautiful record as "The Milk-Eyed Mender" is.

Newsom was to become much more ambtious on he next album Ys whilst still maintaining her trademarks here, but the childlike beauty of "The Milk-Eyed Mender" is still a must-hear for serious music fans.

I am a 53 year old grandmother, but I have never been so addicted to any CD like I am to 'Milk Eyed Mender'.I had only heard 'En Gallop' and 'Sprout and the Bean'before I bought the CD and felt sick for wasting money after listening to it for the first time.Now I go to bed with headphones on[my family think I'm scatty]and just can't get enough.Even if it doesn't last,I am happy for the pleasure I've had so far-other music seems boring now.

Miss Newsom is an excellent musician. Once one becomes accustomed to her unusual, but hauntingly lovely voice, the poetry of her words washes over you. Well written and expertly performed.

Joanna Newsom definitley is an aquired taste, and for some reason she brings out the ugliest side of the indie scene. You know the whole thing has gotten pretty lame when Rolling Stone magazine, infamous for being the lamest and out of it music publication this side of Spin Magazine, calls her fans posturing hipsters.

On the other hand...there seem to be a lot of male fans in their 20s who seem to think of Newsom as a goddess. I read somewhere it's because indie dudes can't resist a woman who is "fierce but fragile" like Joanna is. That whole thing creeps me out. She's not above criticism either. I wish people would just chill out and focus on her music and forget about indie status and hipsters and how hot the artist is for once. That's the trouble with having a music scene where everyone is so young.

Anyway, good album. I particularly enjoy "Sadie", "This Side of the Blue" and "Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie". Her lyrics are some of the best. The harp is beautiful and not too complicated; her voice can be very beautiful and if you can't get past her screechy voice at least it's something new and interesting.