Album Review: Joanna Newsom - Divers

Love her or loathe her, someone with a voice like Joanna Newsom can't be ignored; that voice, that harp, the way that otherworldly melding of the two find their way into the subconscious.

Refusing to give in to Newsom's siren-like ways ensures you miss out on a whole world of the weird and wonderful, and it's even more the case with Divers. The five-year gap between her latest and 2010's Have One On Me hasn't dimmed Newsom's oddity, nor has it subdued her penchant for stylised orchestration to back her pearly harp plucks, but this time she nails the holistic sense of an album more than ever before, creating a start-to-finish storybook of nautical tales that are hard not to get swept away with.

The usual orchestration — oboes, fiddles, organs — underpins these seaside musings beautifully, ironic given the woody sounds on opener Anecdotes and others. While some tracks tend to dip into obscurity, waterlogged by organ swells and harp flourishes (The Things I Say, Same Old Man, You Will Not Take My Heart Alive), there is a whole bunch of genre-bending stuff going on. Sapokanikan's blues bent, for instance, parts the sea of twee folk and gives us some piano and light kitwork that dances around her trilling vocal. Goose Eggs adds some rock with a solid beat and guitar bends; Waltz Of The 101st Lightborne fuses pop and the avant garde, sounding every bit like Carole King and Kate Bush got together; and the title track gives us classic Newsom with her breathy piping over lush cascading harp plucks.