Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me

Rating: * * * *

Lavishly packaged in a cardboard box and adorned with pictures of the fetching harp player, pianist and singer Joanna Newsom's third album is very easy on the eye. However, the 18 tracks inside - that's more than two hours across three discs - are more demanding and come across both beautiful and stunning, as well as harrowing and weighty.

Newsom is like Kate Bush in her elegant yet erratic ways, especially on nine-minute long Kingfisher where she darts and dives between piercing shriek, sweetness, and deep baritone. She sounds stunning on Go Long, with its plaintive harp and prowling vocals that break into a folky soprano-like serenade; Soft As Chalk is more heavy handed, with tantrum-like beats, and then it lightens up into glittering piano; and then tracks like Occident are sometimes even torturous. Which is not such a bad thing when it comes to music and on Have One On Me Newsom has gone for something ambitious and vast and she pulls it off.

Lyrically she's a marvel - and has a preoccupation with booze on this album, it seems. She can be cutting and blunt ("My heart became a drunken runt on the day I sunk in this shunt"), and then funny and lovely ("Hear the frog going courting, till the day he croaks").

Not that her stories reveal themselves easily because her peculiar and divergent singing is initially distracting. But like the harp and piano, her voice is an instrument as well - and it's both mesmerising and menacing all in one.

Scott Kara