¤ milky moon ¤

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRuPSf2Zh34

I was so fortunate to catch this live. Enjoy, everyone!

Unofficial name: Look and Despair.

the MP3: http://tindeck.com/listen/kaqu

Thoughts:

3:57- Did you all hear what I heard? That definitely caught me off guard, considering Newsom's lack of the seven words you can't say (brilliantly done by George Carlin, here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgZZ82tp5es. I like it in this song though, she works it in with her wordsmith magic.

Also, just uggg, the vocal part 3:30 onward is stunning. She seems to just continually add new vocal capacity and techniques to her repertoire. I love the shift & play between the two parts of the song, reminiscent of the progression from the first to second half of Have One On Me (the song).

I'm liking the ideas developing in the two songs we've heard. She recurrently mentions long periods of time , seen in the repetition of "infinite" or "why are the pains of birth lighter born than the pain of death" from Diver's Wife. In Look and Despair, the first half is full references to the ancient, then moves to an imagined future, "a hunter from 100 years from now may look and despair". These contrast the historicized past with the future and death. I find this and Diver's Wife to be some of Joanna's most philosophical and perhaps, darkest music to date. Though, 'dark' with Joanna means a completely different thing than it does with most artists; she creates beauty and a love, in many senses of the word, out of our mortality better than any artist I can think of.

One of those moments where I'm so grateful to have artist like this in my life.

Exciting!

ichiboy, pitchfork just copied out the contents of your post, then linked to it in some kind of sloppy citational footnote what an awful website.

I want to try and get the lyrics down properly before I start to talk about it, but from the lyrics discussing records, scholars, masters, biases, marble colonades etc. and the dialogue between men towards the end it really conjures an atmosphere of dusty researchers in academic study

I just watched the video for the first time. I didn't clearly pick out a single word, nor was I able to identify a recognizable melody. Yet, I am practically dumbstruck! Her performance was mesmerizing! I feel enchanted, very much like I did the first time I heard her sing, when I saw the last half of her Sprout and the Bean video back in April of 2005. Does this mean that I'm about to become a "real" fan again? Oh God! I hope not!

You mean "fanboy". I mean, it's gorgeous and affecting, but it's not magic.

"The cause is Ozymandian"

fuck!

thanks Jordan! I was working on the bridge again and your choices match my own edits.

haha, I was searching those names too! "and to see John Powrie Mitchell depart" does sound like the line... I can't think what it could be other than Mitchell.

With Ozymandian and phosphoresce, I think we're seeing a return to her not being embarrassed to use her vocabulary. She toned it down a little after hydrocephalitic, spelunking, etc. on Ys, the words critics always quoted as exemplary of her style.

That "John's force" is confusing, too. I think "contaminant" could be being used adjectivally, to mean "contaminating", but I'm not sure. I seem to recall her using a similar word similarly in another song. So it'd be, "in whose employ, contaminant, [this older man] proceeded ______".

No yeah, she really savours every syllable and there's so much delectable consonance and assonance going on. The "Do you love me?" part is very Have One on Me, however, all simplicity and sincerity and melisma. The work feels like a culmination.

Lots of wonderfully long sentences, too, which is quite Ysian. This and The Diver's Wife do seem kinda like Ys meets HOOM. And it's such a pleasure to hear her voice soaring about those higher registers again, like it used to. I guess her vocal chords recovered?

yep!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Purroy_Mitchel

I think we all have some reading to do!

Mayor of New York? Well, that fits in with Tammany Hall.

yep! also, the "boy mayor"

let's see what this Dutch master thing is referring to...

Presumably one of the Renaissance painters from the Netherlands. Did any of them hide any bones? Is there a Biblical story of Tobias and an angel, and if so, did any of the Dutch masters paint it?

A few little corrections that I think work:

So we all raise a standard
to which the wise and honest so may repair,

I will the hunter to decipher the start,
and what lies under the city is dark.

Fantastic job on the rest, you two, especially the specific names that I would've never gotten.

So John Purroy Mitchell confounded Tammany Hall by running against their candidate, though he lost; the Dutch master painted Tobias and the angel, which scholars surmise is a painting of a mother and child? It'd be good to see Rembrandt's reworking; I'll have a look for that now.