The best Freak-folk (I use this here as the lamentably fashionable term for the music produced by the New Weird America movement) often sounds like some sort of pirate radio broadcast from Macondo, transmissions filtered through enough sonic and psychic fuzz so as to seem disconnected from any knowable time or place except some magical-realist 'where the wild things are'. Devendra Banhart's first Young God album exemplified this, recorded ultra-lo-fi on answering machines and 4-tracks, featuring a quietly plucked acoustic, sparing piano and drums, and sometimes simply clapping and Devendra's own peculiarly cracked voice, stretching under the warp and woof of the strange timelessness of his modern primitive sound.
Joanna Newsom's first album, the Milk-Eyed Mender (featuring Banhart, as well as Will Oldham/Bonny Prince Billy/The Queen of England or whatever the hell he calls himself now), lacked Oh No!'s lo-fi 'production' but communicated a less worn wyrdness (this isn't just some feminist 'womyn' reclamation, there's an air of old-school (both old Appalachian and like, pre-roman) fatalism to some of these tunes), more tempered with child-like wonder than the sense of solitude leaking through in Banhart's work. Newsom can do melancholy (‘Sadie’ 's one of the most beautiful laments for a dead friend/buried dog bone I've ever heard) but not the same way Banhart does; if Banhart can sound preternaturally old, Joanna's milieu is youth. Her dancing harp-plucks keep her carousing (and often stumbling) voice grounded, allowing her to fall in rain puddles of stretched vocal range without muddying her jumper or messying her hair too much.
Y's is a rather radical departure/progression from this; displaying exactly how fatuous "freak-folk" 's use as a genre catchall can be. Newsom's still got youth going for her, her inner rhymes and fleet-footed (sometimes just barely enough so to keep her in step) syntax still hold that same "Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow" joy in language as before, but this time her voice can keep up with her harp, her dancing among those dangerous highs yielding lyrical cartwheel’s rather than the (either intensely annoying or wonderfully endearing, depending on your perspective) vocal splashes as before. The instrumentation has grown by leaps and bounds as well, as her gorgeous harp is now accentuated and counter-pointed by Van Dyke Parks’ equally gorgeous arrangements (featuring an orchestra which includes a guitar, an electric bass, and (!) a mouth harp). Her songs must now be read as classical compositions as well as pop-folk ditties, as ‘Monkey and Bear’ takes on the tale of a fugitive dancing bear and her simian lover/svengali and ‘Only Skin’ weaves a sixteen-minute epic out of a careless fall. At five songs and fifty-five minutes, Y’s takes patience, not the same kind of puddle splash/skinned knee kind of tolerance that Milk-Eyed Mender required at times, the forgiveness of youth’s happy folly, but rather the willingness to accept the lack thereof, to accept a new sonic maturity which separates Joanna Newsom from her “freak-folk” contemporaries, certainly new, weird, and American (though less explicitly so) but requiring an attention to detail and beauty far beyond what has previously been received in these strangely wonderful parcels from whatever secret station in wherever.
