All classic records deserve their own creation myth, and Joanna Newsom's second album has a pretty good one. The story begins, for our purposes, in a small studio in Los Angeles. Steve Albini, working with characteristic crisp precision, has been hired to record Newsom's voice and harp, to capture the movement of air and her callused fingers across the strings. Newsom has brought five songs to the sessions: the shortest, "Cosmia", lasts for seven minutes and the longest, "Only Skin", stretches to nearly 17.   Full text...

It’s a vivid and beautiful painting that you can walk into; a magic window into another world that I'd be happy to get lost in, and never come back.  Full text...

he people who hear this record will split into two crowds: The ones who think it's silly and precious, and the ones who, once they hear it, won't be able to live without it.  Full text...

Ys is an immersive album of classical pop with proggy, cyclic structures, more long-winded than its hippie forbearers and twice as tiring because it bothers trying to sustain precision.   Full text...

It's an exceptionally clever album.  Full text...

Reasons to love this album: first, listen to her voice. That voice -- which brought such great criticism and so many strange comparisons last time around -- seems drastically different. Partly due to Albini's recording, I'm sure, capturing every inflection and twitch; but her range of delivery has also expanded significantly. No longer is she the creepy-little-girl/woodland-witch; honestly, for most of the album she sounds quite normal. Not that I was put off by her voice on the debut, but it seems like it might have been something of a crutch that she's done away with here.   Full text...

"Only Skin" is the longest and most involved song, a pantheistic piece in which opposites - dream and wakefulness, earth and water, animate and inanimate, day and night - shade into each other as Newsom relates the epiphanic experience of rescuing an injured bird, taking it up a mountain to recuperate, and watching it soar off again.  Full text...

Sophisticated orchestral magic from your favourite harp player  Full text...

Unabashedly opulent and tremendously emotional, Ys will certainly heighten Joanna Newsom's already considerable reputation.   Full text...

Ys may not be clasped to the public's collective bosom, but, like all the Dylans and Fitzgeralds before her, Newsom deserves to be seen as much more than just "art".  Full text...

Newsom is a classically trained harpist and singer who made a very good 2004 record, but this EP is hard to stomach: Five tracks, four of them more than nine minutes and one ("Only Skin") sixteen-plus, with meandering strings-and-things accompaniment and indulgent vocal quirks that make Bjork sound like Kelly Clarkson.  Full text...