Divers

Description

Dive, listener, knowing that your next hour will be filled with diversions aplenty: a wheeling circuit of sci-fi sea-shanties and cavalier ballads narrated from parts unknown; a family of polysemic song-sets; a paranomasaic Liederkreis of harmonic sympathies and knotted hierarchies; a fanfare of brazen puns and martial lullabies, blazing in sorrow and horseplay and love, in turns symphonic and spare, joined by Mellotrons and Marxophones and Moogs, clavichords and celestas and, of course, the harp, thrumming its threnodies of circadian invasions and avian irruptions and strange loops of Shepardtoned resonant-frequencies.

Divers reminds us that Newsom is a melodist, above all an acolyte of melody and beauty in form, a crackerjack of emotional truth conveyed with undiluted immediacy. The Things I Say seems a naked admission after the epic swales of war and peace that precede it and yet this sudden moment of piano and voice falls seamlessly into the flow, buffeted by the haunting winds of a musical saw and time-slipping reversal at the finish.

Contributors include Nico Muhly, Ryan Francesconi, Dave Longstreth, Dan Cantrell, Kevin Barker, Peter Newsom, Neal Morgan and The City Of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra.

Recorded with snow-bright, high-noon-verity by Steve Albini and Noah Georgeson, mixed in phantasmagoric, deep-seasaturation by Noah and Joanna and released by Drag City Records.

The packaging of Divers is driven by the spectacular and otherworldly images of contemporary artist Kim Keever alongside photographs by Annabel Mehran.