Consumer Guide Album

Joanna Newsom: The Milk-Eyed Mender [Drag City, 2004]
Not only does she sing in a fey little voice and fingerpick a damn harp, she hangs out with the wrong crowd--hippie folkies, basically. So snub her on principle if you like, but note this quatrain (yes, quatrain): "And the signifieds butt heads with the signifiers/and we all fall down slack-jawed to marvel at words/while across the sky sheet the impossible birds/in a steady illiterate movement homewards." Sorry, folks, that's s-m-a-r-t whether you like its drift or not, and there's plenty more where it came from. Right, she's chronically whimsical--the final song adduces dragons. But her whimsy is genuinely funny, and though the melodies fade on the second half, which damages the poetry, there at the end of the faintest one comes the wise warning: "Never get so attached to a poem/you forget truth that lacks lyricism." So I won't. A-