Overview

Critic Score

Based on 40 reviews

2015 Ratings: #7 / 977

Year End Rank: #13

User Score

Based on 580 ratings

2015 Ratings: #7

Liked by 33 people

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October 23, 2015 / Release Date

LP / Format

Drag City / Label

Singer-Songwriter, Chamber Folk / Genres

CRITIC REVIEWS

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100

This dense lyricism is keenly matched with rich, luxuriant instrumentation and Divers perhaps reaches a zenith in Newsom’s arrangement skills.

100

These are startlingly beautiful, fiercely inventive songs, couched in the metaphysical, touching on the universal, born from a deeply personal place.

100

100

8mo

Such is the album’s richness and fluidity that one could ignore Joanna’s words and still come away enthralled, which is not a statement to be taken lightly when it concerns a piece of work as involved as this.

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.

Divers proves Newsom is still capable of maintaining one of the most original voices in the world of music while constantly giving that voice new ways to speak.

She’s often described as childlike, due to her lovely, elfin voice and her affection for fairy tales, but Divers comes from a highly sophisticated mind, with its complicated, polyrhythmic arrangements and lyrics that explore the nature of time.

For all its bewitching scholarly accomplishment, this is a wonderfully natural-feeling album, whose heart has even more to offer than its thrillingly skilful head.

It's a truly incredible album, a special album and a rare album. Give in to it because, before you're ready to let it go, it's gone.

Rather than breaking from Newsom's tradition of complex, bewitching songwriting, Divers feels like the culmination of all of Newsom's incredible work over the past decade.

In many ways, Newsom’s new record is a distillation of all the differing qualities that have made her albums to date so distinctive, combining the childlike simplicity of The Milk Eyed Mender, the ambitious, almost symphonic arrangements of Ys and the stylistic variations of Have One On Me.

Divers is, to greatly oversimplify its project and to mention only one of its many mythic frames of reference, about the fall and redemption of humanity. That divine catastrophe is scaled down to the commonly human quantity of the sensible work of art, rich in emotional honesty and poetic complexity.

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.

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.

Her consummate craft is a given; what surprises every time is her ceaselessly renewing sensitivity for life's vicissitudes and the fantastic ways she finds to express them.

Divers is almost uniformly lovely to listen to.

Northern Transmissions

Divers doesn’t have the same sort of scope of Newsom’s last release, 2010’s triple-disc Have One On Me, but it in no way lacks for grandeur or spectacle. The multiple, multifarious layers of pianos, stringed instruments, guitars, and drums blend together to create a stunningly beautiful full-on pop symphony.

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.

If she has indeed made her most musically rewarding album since the first one, it’s telling that Divers doesn’t stretch Newsom’s music any further than the last two albums have. It’s just more organized, is all! Praise be!

It’s reassuring that, five years on, the 33-year-old is back with something utterly predictable: yet another masterpiece.

A concept album about history, memory, movement, loss and love, the emotional tone here — a wry, wistful melancholy — is pretty straightforward, a function of Newsom's tightened focus.

It’s at turns maddening, exhausting, enrapturing, insightful and very beautiful. But it always feels like the work of an artist who’s out there on her own, doing something no one else is doing.

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.

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.

Though ‘Divers’ is a close relation of Newsom’s previous record ‘Have One On Me,’ it also harks back to the beautiful simplicity of her earliest work. It doesn’t, however, storm off to explore entirely new landscapes with quite the same ferocious tenacity as previous albums.

The singer-songwriter's first album in five years, Divers, adds electric guitar to the mix, yet stays true to her original template of epic poetry set to masterful harp-plucking and vocal ascents that climb toward the stratosphere.

The goals aren’t as lofty as before, but by streamlining her sound, she is able to hit with some of the most direct and powerful songs of her career.

It’s when everything begins to fan out like a peacock’s tail at the height of the courting season that you’re reminded just why Newsom is a 21st century oneoff.

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

Singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom's latest record is equally beautiful and conceptual.

12mo

User Reviews

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Primary Kyrsten Sinema

How high is the bar set with Joanna Newsom that Divers is considered to be a disappointment by some in her fanbase??

The biggest thing going against this album is that it's just that: an album - not a three-disc American songbook epic, not a five-track baroque pop masterclass whose shortest song is over seven minutes - just a standard eleven-track album. For some, this already reduces potential enjoyment simply because it seems less ambitious in scope. Good thing Newsom really brings it with ... read more

patricia4221

100

Storytime:

So, I had been dying to listen to Joanna Newsom's music. Her reviews were fantastic and fans really seemed to like her. I then decided to buy Ys, Have One On Me, and Divers from Bandcamp; and honestly? Best 38 dollars I've spent in my life.

Let me start off by saying that I was not expecting to be blown away so badly. I was not expecting THIS from reading the tag "indie folk." The first time I listened to Divers, I knew instantly that she was the one. After listening to ... read more

1y*

nullsethope

I’m addicted

Doofy

You get the feeling that with 'Divers' Newsom is trying to reconnect with some of the magic she left behind on 'Ys', while also acknowledging the lessons learned from releasing the more conventional but sprawling 'Have One on Me'.

You have to respect that once again she's aiming for another unique mood with this set of songs, and it's definitely a wise move when you're still (largely) building everything around harp compositions that you would concentrate on the atmospherics colouring your ... read more

6mo*

snarekickblues

Random number generator told me to put 3

EDIT: New random number is 44

EDIT(2): Congrats! Today's number is 76

EDIT(3): Incredible!! Our new random number is 88!

EDIT(4): I finally listened to it! Non-random number = 86!

EDIT(5): Dam son gotta bump it up to an 89.

EDIT(9.4): 9.4 BNM

5y*

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