Product 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 Shepard-toned resonant-frequencies and something called goddamned Simulacreage...

The music of Divers is a wonder of considered arrangements a taut line, threaded with the pearls of passed and passing times...a round, a chant, an incantation...a ray of light diverted eleven ways, into eleven songs that striate, in chromatic collusion, their simultaneous arc...a span that takes in lifetimes, but is immaculately sequenced for telescoped brevity. The music speeds with dissociative dread over montaged cityscapes; it hoofs with delight among the collaged quotations and sepia-toned codices of Popular Song; it ambles its carefree citational course through the public domain and down into the dustier corners of municipal parks, to lionize infamous airmen and anonymous Dutch Masters, to mourn pearl divers and Poorwills, and to elegize the ineluctable tragedy of relativity a tragedy of parochial time, anecdotal time, dubious time...

Review

Her most dynamic and exhilarating album...what surprises every time is her ceaselessly renewing sensitivity for life's vicissitudes and the fantastic ways she finds to express them. --Pitchfork

Newsoms brainiest album, which is no small claim, but also her prettiest...The melodies unfold in ways that are hard to predict but surprisingly easy to learn by heart, after a few days of repeated listening, and repeated listening is what Divers demands. --New Yorker

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, Joan Didion, a smart Californian just like Newsom, once wrote. But what if, at least in music, the stories that give songs magic are the listeners as much as the artists? If Newsoms songs recall painful or happy memories from our own lives, isn t that enough? --The Fader