[phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 483: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 112: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead [phpBB Debug] PHP Notice: in file /includes/bbcode.php on line 112: preg_replace(): The /e modifier is no longer supported, use preg_replace_callback instead ¤ milky moon ¤ • View topic - Favourite Album
Aghghghghg I have such serious issues with HOOM! It really drives me crazy. I had a bit of an identity crisis last March because I didn't understand who I was if I didn't absolutely adore a Joanna Newsom album.
Well, Ys has four songs on it that I really love. I was never that crazy about Sawdust & Diamonds. HOOM has Have One On Me, In California, Soft As Chalk, Good Intentions Paving Company, Kingfisher, Does Not Suffice and a ton of songs that are way better live like Jackrabbits and Esme. I love the songs on Ys more, but there's more to love on HOOM.
I think that HOOM was as profound as Ys. Every song on Ys is stunning, but some on HOOM are meh. Like Autumn. A pretty song, but not a great song. Don't get me wrong, HOOM has some great songs. But EVERY song on Ys is a great one.
Of course, I have one aim, the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing.
I still stand steadfastly by Milk-Eyed Mender! Takes me back...
Obviously I like all three, but I'll give a brief explanation for each:
HOOM: I really enjoy it, but it IS quite long, and ann is right that there are a lot of "meh" songs on it. It also bothers me that so many of the songs use the same material - the chords for In California are EXACTLY THE SAME as Baby Birch! Same key, same order... drives me NUTS. And she uses the "tango" rhythm in almost every song.
Ys: I psyched myself up for Ys and was a little let down by it. I thought it was going to blow my mind like MEM did, and it didn't - I finished my first listen and felt strangely "blah" about it, which is also how I felt after the first time I saw her live (and the second). The songs are great, the lyrics are great, the orchestral arrangements are great, and I get a LOT of pleasure out of listening to them, but... the songs themselves, sans-arrangements, are kind of dull, the lyrics can be too obtuse and meaningless, and the orchestra is pretty sloppy at times (which is what happens when you record the soloist apart from the ensemble).
MEM: My first exposure. I felt that each song was totally unique from the others, making Joanna a versatile composer. Each song is very distinctive, unlike HOOM where they all use similar elements, and unlike Ys where she's simply improvising over chords. I loved the lyrics - I'm a fan of simplicity, and the lyrics in some songs like Sadie and "En Gallop" were simple-but-weighty. I can listen to MEM and really "feel" what it was like to be where I was when I bought it. MEM is like a photo album while Ys is like a trip to a museum - sometimes it's nice to stay at home in your pajamas and reminisce about the little things.
I voted Ys. When I first listened to The Milk-Eyed Mender, I wasn't super into it. It was definitely a grower, and it took seeing her live to make it click. And when I saw her live, she played Sawdust & Diamonds and Cosmia and they totally blew me away. I spent the next year anticipating Ys like crazy, listening to any bootleg I could get my hands on. I was a little worried that I had spoiled the album for myself by listening to the bootlegs too much before it was released, but the first time I listened to the album it was like each song was new. I think the best thing about the first listen was knowing that it would keep surprising me, both musically and lyrically, and that I wouldn't get everything right away. Even now, I still notice new things when I listen to it.
The Milk-Eyed Mender and Have One On Me are both special to me too, but I think Ys is magical.
It's too late to be grateful It's too late to be late again It's too late to be hateful
I'm not quite ready to vote yet, but it was thought-provoking to read what others have said already.
Discussing the relative merits of one album (or song, as in the JNST) over another runs the risk of seeming to put one down in order to praise the other, so by way of a disclaimer I wanted to point out that I wouldn't be here if I wasn't a very big fan of an overwhelming proportion of Joanna's output. I am sure the same goes for other writers here, too. Every put-down should be seen in relative terms, and that's how I am assuming doublewuzzy wants us to read what at first appear to be rather harsh criticisms of Ys and HOOM.
Like Jordan~, I am deliberating between Ys and HOOM, although - like ursulabear - I'd like to have seen Walnut Whales and Yarn & Glue in there too. I've a soft spot for WW, it has some good otherwise-unreleased songs and (because I've listened to them a bit less) they have perhaps remained slightly 'fresher' than their sisters on MEM.
I was surprised, yet somewhat enlightened, by ann's difficult in bonding with HOOM. Like doublewuzzy, I too experienced a short period of feeling a little disappointed after my first hearings of both Ys and HOOM. But in both cases, they revealed themselves to me over the next few days. Unlike many, I wasn't familiar with live versions of any/many of the songs before the official releases, and they are largely unusual songs which took a bit of getting used to. I suppose that, for me, the mark of being 'a fan' is an ability to give an album a second, 3rd, 4th listen in the belief that the revelation will come, whereas whereas an album from another artist that doesn't click first time might be overlooked - perhaps unfairly. But I do not mean to suggest, of course, that ann hasn't given HOOM a fair crack of the whip, but perhaps she could employ a technique like mine: After a while, my strategy with HOOM was to break it down into songs I knew I liked, those I was unsure about, and those I was struggling to connect with. I could listen to them in chunks, and read the reasons why other people found some of those in my 3rd category so bewitching, and gradually songs migrated up from the 2nd and 3rd towards the first. (The most spectacular rise being that of Kingfisher, which I came to appreciate very much by discovering how to listen to it from comments on MilkyMoon). But I cannot disagree with doublewuzzy: MEM grabs you from the very first listen, and you know straightaway that it is something special. (It is interesting, though, how claire responded differently - and I suppose this goes to show how 'preparation' can affect an initial response to an album. In my case, I think I was equally unprepared for all three). But for me, it now seems just a little less 'weighty' than the other two, and that is why I veer slightly towards those. Not that there's any reason why weight should win out over lightness: both have very strong attractions and I guess it's just a matter of different personal tastes that keep us a varied bunch of admirers.
travvyishot makes an excellent point, too: how do you judge the greatness of an album? By comparing its very peak? By selecting the one with the higher number of 'great songs', or the one with the higher numerical percentage of them? Or perhaps the one with the fewest 'not so good' ones; or the smaller percentage, which is not the same thing. Or should we stick to numbers of songs: Only Skin is as long as perhaps 4 or 5 MEM songs, so if you like it (all the way through), is it fair to balance it off against just one song from MEM that you like equally. Perhaps, then, you could count the "minutes of greatness" in an album ... but contrarily that would mean a huge release by an infinite number of [arctic?] monkeys would be the greatest ever, despite the fact that it is almost all unlistenably bad! On the other other hand, would an album consisting of just one magnificent song qualify as a 'great'?
Perhaps part of ann's difficulty with HOOM is that its best and worst moments are more randomly scattered - and again this is a spin-off from the length issue that doublewuzzy highlighted. This is a personal reading of the three, and I am struggling to decide how to present my argument here: perhaps a crude graphic, as I've no idea how to get an image in here (I'll post it separately so as not to make a mess). But the point I hope it will make is that MEM and Ys are more 'consistent' albums, and the lower spots (relatively speaking) are clustered together, meaning that the highs are prolonged and sustained.
Last edited by Steve on 04 May 2011, 13:20, edited 2 times in total.
Ha! Well, this is as much of a test of how it is possible to get pictures into this forum than a scientific study of the relative merits of each album. But my personal perception of the "highs and lows" of the three can be illustrated, roughly, by the graphic below (if it works!) My point is that both MEM and Ys are smoother, more consistent, whereas HOOM is a somwhat more uneven listening experience.
The first ever Joanna song I heard was 'Book of Right-On', so it still holds a special place in my heart. I started listening to MEM before I started listening to Ys, I have always LOVED it. Ys just knocked me down, I was so struck by it. MEM was so pretty and wonderful, but I think that Ys has more feeling. But maybe I was sp affected by them because I was a Joanna n00b. When HOOM came out, Ii'd been listening to Joanna for years, so it didn't affect me as much.
Of course, I have one aim, the grotesque. If I am not grotesque I am nothing.
You are right, Steve - though it sounds harsh, I do like all three albums. I even made a playlist of the songs from HOOM I DIDN'T like so that I could listen to them, and have since come to like them. All the criticisms I made are things that are forgivable and that I have forgiven. The most important thing is that something's been created - the criticism is just a way for me to articulate why I like MEM so much.
Another bit on HOOM: it's not the length of the songs that bothers me, because I'm fine with it, it's that the album itself is SO long with all of those ups and downs, just as you described in your visual. Maybe it's better listened to as three separate albums?
Thank you. I am glad the visual was visible. It's a bit fiddly, isn't it, loading them somewhere else first. I thought on the old forum we could just paste in jpegs (I put some daddy-longlegses up, and I know I didn't have to make an Imageshack account!).
I thought I would join in with the discussion on the albums: I voted for Ys as my favourite album. Although it's my favourite, I think I love all of her albums but in different ways. MEM was obviously very special because it was the first of her albums that I bought, and something about the simplicity of the songs I think really showcased her songwriting talent and also her voice (her voice on Sprout and the Bean and Sadie was just beautiful), but there are some tracks on there that either I find slightly boring (eg. Cassiopeia and Bridges and Balloons) or that I have so often performed (eg. En Gallop and Book of Right-On) that I am now slightly tired of, even though I still love the songs. Also I feel like MEM had a familiarity to it, like when I listened to it for the first time it felt like I had been listening to these songs my whole life.
With Ys, I adore the arrangements (after doing some research on Van Dyke Parks I realised that I already had some other music that he has arranged, so I guess that explains why I loved it so much) and her voice on the high notes, when she does that slight vibrato thing, was really amazing (I subconsciously picked up some of her singing techniques when I sing, I noticed recently, which is a bit odd). I really liked that darker edge to Ys, because it just made it more layered and deeper than Milk-Eyed Mender. Sometimes I think that she will possibly never be able to write anything as beautiful as Ys again, just because it seems like nothing else that she has done (this thought always strikes me when I hear the chord sequences in Emily, like when she's singing, "We've seen those mountains kneeling..." etc). Even though she did the whole 'long intense songs' thing before Ys with Flying a Kite/What we have known, and after in HOOM, I think it's not really the same.
With Have One On Me, I did love the album, but this time it was less to do with her voice and the arrangements and more to do with the lyrics. The way in which they were so direct at times really made me feel like I could relate to it a lot more (like the way that a lot of the songs are based around her love for her hometown), and also I'd always wished that she would do some jazz music, so that was a really awesome surprise the first time I heard Easy and Soft as Chalk. I know that doublewuzzy has often mentioned the thing with the identical chord sequences in In California/Does Not Suffice/Baby Birch, and the tango rhythm, and the fact that she often writes in the key of D major, but I think that she was never going to be able to keep doing completely original songs. The thing about MEM was that the songs were all super different to eachother, and then the songs on Ys were pretty different. There's only really so much you can do until you start repeating yourself. With the key of D major, I also think it's to do with which keys she feels comfortable singing in, and with the tango rhythms that she plays I think that it's sort of like how in piano playing there are certain rhythms and stuff that people will often use. I feel like it's just that with the harp it's more noticeable, because she has done all the different stuff with MEM in the past. As for the chord sequences, it never really bothered me because I sort of liked having the album almost follow a sort of theme. There were songs on HOOM that I sometimes skip over (Autumn and Ribbon Bows, for example), but I don't think there are any songs that I actually dislike. In all honesty I don't listen to Joanna's music that often anymore, for fear of over-listening to it and making it seem less special. When I do listen to it, I try and listen to the albums in their entirety. Overall I think I'm saying that I agree that it is very difficult to actually judge what makes the albums good compared to one another, but I think that Ys will forever be the most beautiful album I own.
I put all 3 albums in context of my top 10 albums of all-time or desert island discs
Being a fan since before MEM was released- and my first live show was all WW/MEM material- MEM has a very special place in my heart
But I voted Ys. Ys is one of those albums that comes along once in a decade for me that is a complete, conceptualized vision from the first note to the last note and takes me places I have never been,
Although I have posted on this forum before, I am still more or less new, so I will officially say hello.
Some of you have mentioned a 'tango rhythm' that Joanna employs in HOOM. I think you're referring to the habanera rhythm, which originated in Cuba. I think it's unfair to say that she is becoming repetitive, as there are only two obvious uses of it on the album, i.e. Ribbon Bows and Does Not Suffice. Even so, they still sound vastly different.
As for songs using the same chords, well that's just how limiting the western system is, unless you want to get weird and abstract. Does Not Suffice is a reprise of In California anyway, so that doesn't really count. Pop music has been using the same chords for like 50+ years.
It's difficult to pick a favourite album, as all three are very different, but it would have to be HOOM. I love that it has a pop sensibility, but still has the breadth and complexity of Ys. Although many people dislike the lack of cohesion, I absolutely love that quality to it. It's like a treasure trove, which you can just dip into.