The singing is weird and variable, the string arrangements are occasionally brilliant, and the tone is that of a 1930s surrealist cartoon that cheerfully dismembered some myth nobody had cared about for centuries. Ys has its moments; each of the five long tracks breaks down into roughly the same proportions of tedium and inspiration, and there are times when Joanna Newsom’s singing is almost as interesting as, say, Connee Boswell’s or Joni Mitchell’s.
Yet the overriding aesthetic seems to be that of prog-rock. If Newsom is a jazz singer, albeit one who operates mostly in one emotional register, and who has concocted a story lifted from a Breton folktale, she also seems as needlessly arty as Peter Gabriel or Yes’ Jon Anderson.
Van Dyke Parks’ orchestral arrangements do a valiant job of making Newsom’s rather limited harmonic imagination seem fresh. “Only Skin” works as an example of the heightened colloquial tone Newsom is presumably going after: There are nice touches of marimba and accordion, and the interplay between the strings and Newsom’s harp near the end of the track is exciting.
Still, Ys tries too hard to be gnomic, even if “Monkey & Bear” carries a moral in tow, and seems to imply an attitude toward the material itself. A line such as, “And the meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee,” is as close to a statement of purpose as this record has, so we’re left with some interesting moments, most of them musical. “Cosmia” uses a kind of implied clave, and even swings like samba at the end; but compare this stuff to Parks and Brian Wilson’s work on Smile, or Astor Piazzolla or, for that matter, Connee Boswell, and you’ll hear the difference between interesting experiment and compelling art.
