Divers

Not only a deftly realised, enchanting meditation on time and its vagaries, the record is effectively a celebration of what we, as time’s denizens, are able to accomplish within it.... Divers is a colossal achievement.

With a formidable knack for telling an engaging story in the space of a song, Divers is further proof that, as a lyricist, Newsom is second to none.

This is an album of remarkable consistency and sparkling beauty. If her music hasn’t clicked for you yet, listen to this record until it does.

Joanna Newsom’s fourth full-length, Divers, haunts you like an unanswered question. That’s what makes it so engrossing. You don’t listen to it to figure out what it means. You play it to revel in the mystery of the songs and who, exactly, is the marvelous, mercurial creature singing them.

Like all Newsom’s albums, it is full of beautiful music and lyrics that initially appear enigmatic but are in fact simply dense, but it’s the first one to embed within itself, on various levels, the necessity to continue mining its depths.

This is an album that is constantly unfolding over its themes, so the only option remaining is that of acceptance of her ingenuity. If you want to make it easy, you can acknowledge the density and move on. If you want to understand the core of the record, you'll have plenty of details to work through for what now seems like forever.

On Divers, her breathtaking follow-up to 2010’s “Have One on Me,” the singer, songwriter, and harpist affirms her stature as a visionary. It’s the most streamlined of her four albums.

What is arguably Joanna Newsom’s most consistently outstanding record to date.

Divers steps outside of itself. Its lyrics are obscure, and its melodies are more variable and complicated than those of the “overstuffed gorge” some saw in 2010’s Have One On Me. At particular moments, though, it is plainspoken and personal.

[A] rather brilliant record.... You almost want to hold the whole thing still, flatten it out and study it.

It's a truly incredible album, a special album and a rare album.

It's the sound of an artist operating at the peak of her powers, employing all her greatest strengths at once to create an assured, moving work that corroborates what Have One On Me already suggested: that Joanna Newsom is one of the finest songwriters of this generation.

Divers feels like her most comfortable, charming album. [Nov 2015, p.80]

Divers is almost uniformly lovely to listen to.

Divers is not a puzzle to crack, but a dialog that generously articulates the intimate chasm of loss, the way it's both irrational and very real.

Divers takes another logical step, tightening up from the sprawling consistency of Have One on Me without quite tightening up enough to return to Mender’s folk-pop. This is easily Newsom’s most sumptuously arranged album, with a more eclectic palette of instruments than she’s previously employed.

The album winds up feeling like the first in Newsom’s catalog that won’t be considered a classic, but it’s proof that a sturdy, thought-provoking, and rewarding record doesn’t necessarily need to stand next to her past work to find its own greatness.

The sheer array of sounds on this record is amazing--not just in the variety of instruments employed, but also in the ways they are utilized.

Newsom is, obviously, not the first musician to get technically better at what she does while we’re looking on, and not the first, either, to elicit a twinge of regret from listeners who liked the rawer, wilder beginnings.... Divers hides its sting not in an unusual voice, but in its lyrical and musical complexity, and it’s a good trade after all.

For the most part Divers is a magic carpet ride that finds Newsom still spinning wild (and generally impenetrable) interwoven yarns with the jaw-dropping dexterity of a modern-day Scheherazade.

Divers sets itself apart by expanding into new genres and replacing the whimsy of her earlier material with maturity and solemnity.

The result is a lean, compact summary of the joys of Newsom, still an acquired taste to some, but to others, one of the undisputed greats working in our lifetime.

As usual with Newsom, the deeper resonances resound louder with subsequent exposure.

Newsom can make her audience work almost as hard as she does, but the rewards are worth it: Dazzling, profound and affecting, Divers' explorations of time only grow richer the more time listeners spend with them.

She takes a bold, explorative leap into the centre of her own mind.

Less immediate than her debut but not as challenging as her most recent work, Divers is an ideal distillation of everything that makes Joanna Newsom one of the most unceasingly fascinating musicians working today.

There are moments when the insights of Newsom's improvised mythology fall into pseudo-profundity... But still it easily stands with this year's entrancing reinventions of song--Julia Holter's Have You In My Wilderness, Jim O'Rourke's Simple Songs--and the high points of her own catalogue so far. [Nov 2015, p.46]

Newsom's working with a darker palette of colours here, and in all respects--her ideas, musicianship and vocals--is evidently a master.

Ultimately, Divers, is about things lost with age and progress--wisdom, beauty, innocence, love, mystery. Yet this music always seems to look ahead.... Questlove, Kanye, Kendrick and all other curators of hyper-literate avant-pop: Ball's in your court.

It's when everything begins to fan out like a peacock's tail at the height of courting season that you're reminded just why Newsom is a 21st century one-off. [Nov 2015, p.84]

Divers, her unusually tight fourth album, is full of lofty concepts (‘Waltz Of The 101st Lightborne’ sees time-travelling soldiers wage a futile war on their own ghosts) but her crafty tales, signposted by ornate folk arrangements, rarely outpace your imagination.