decade best #26

One of the best of those supposedly limited-edition compilations released in the past decade that I managed to get my hands on a few years back, via a friend (the hard-copy version, that is – oh now, those waning glory days of CDs!), was The Golden Apples of the Sun, the album of freaky folk songs curated by Devendra Banhart for Arthur magazine in 2004. It served as my introduction to interesting performers the likes of Josephine Foster, Vasthi Bunyan, Antony (a really wonderful take of “The Lake”) and the ever compelling Joanna Newsom. Her album is the only one helmed by a female singer-songwriter on this list, but I want to add that I’ve also rather enjoyed the works of Gillian Welch, Cat Power, Aimee Mann and Nina Nastasia in the past decade.

Joanna Newsom

The Milk-Eyed Mender [Drag City, 2004]

Many have burrowed deep into the whimsical music of The Milk-Eyed Mender, reveling in its unknown pleasures and Joanna Newsom's boisterous fairytale poetry. Kindred freak-folk musician Noah Georgeson's pitter-patter production serves her idyllic folk songs very well, allowing the sheer wonder of Newsom's unique voice and harp strings to sink in. Through the course of the melancholy tidelands as imagined in this full-time dreamer's adventurous storytelling, it is fantastical pop songs such as “Inflammatory Writ” and “Bridges and Balloons” that are truest to Newsom's escapist vision. “Never get so attached to a poem/you’ll forget truth that lacks lyricism,” she sings on the gentle ‘En Gallop’ like a haunting aphorism. It is on moments as such where The Milk-Eyed Mender exudes the familiar textures of fever dreams and casts its most endearing spell.