It’s a good thing Joanna Newsom puts out albums at a stately pace, as each one can take years to absorb fully. Her fourth album was no different: laden with weighty themes (death, love, life all that jazz), idiosyncratically structured and intellectually playful. Yet it was undeniably easier to approach than 2010’s three-disc opus, Have One on Me. It felt more human in scale, its themes more clearly threaded throughout, glinting from track to track.
Of course, you didn’t need to ferret out every meaning from those ornate and densely packed lyrical allusions; you could just let the rich music wash over you, catch you up and carry you over the final torrent through delicate, medieval prances, jazzy romps, proggy storms and ever-shifting textures and moods.
Repeat listens revealed subtle embellishments, from the birds that open the first and last tracks to the subtle backmasking that ends The Things I Say. The album’s charms also grew if you succumbed to the glittering lure of Newsom’s wordplay and plunged deep, joining dots between wars, paintings, puns, the meanings of the bird names in Anecdotes, the nature of self in A Pin-Light Bent and the flow of timestreams (it’s an over-used comparison, sure, but Divers seems a sister to Kate Bush’s A Sky of Honey, with its reflections on birds and being).
In the beautiful and bountiful title track, feminism, death and time converge around a mysterious pearl (is it John Steinbeck’s pearl? The Pearl of Middle English poetry? Is Pearl a singer?). But a mark of Newsom’s mature accomplishment is that you don’t need to delve – her feeling and her broader meaning are always immediate, whether you catch every fine detail or not. Mood and themes weave, seep in and build subtly, so you’re gently primed for the final musical and thematic climax in Time, As a Symptom (and what a title), in which life and love and death and time slug it out amid cataclysmic vocals and cosmic strings.
Divers was heavy, heady stuff – the wonder of existence and the pain of living – but worn with delicious, carefully crafted grace. Certainly enough to do us for four years or so.
