Well, it arrived this morning. I just played it, and my first impressions are tilted towards the negative. My two main objections have already been made by Penman & dubversion... the orchestration is overfussy, and for a narrative record it doesnt really seem to go anywhere - it establishes a mood & sticks with it til the end.
It reminds me of Laura Nyro's Eli & The Thirteen Confessions - my least favorite of the four albums Laura recorded in the late 60s (and I am a cast iron, copper bottomed Laura Nyro fanatic) - inpenetrably baroque orchestration, and rampant lyricism, obscuring the emotional core of the songs. Whereas Laura Nyro could just about hold arrangements like this together through sheer melodic genius, the songs on Ys seem to get lost in a maze of time signature changes and gushing stanzas. Ys doesn't have the stylistic variation of Laura Nyro's albums either, or of comparable 60s/70s records like David Ackles' American Gothic.
This is admittedly after only one listen, and I didnt get too much of her lyrics which a lot of people seem to be tripping on. Plus I've never heard Milk Eyed Mender, so I'm coming to Newsom completely cold. I'm doing some travelling over the next week so I'll get the chance to listen to Ys in more detail, I hope it opens up for me a bit.
There's a fascinating doppleganger of the critical consensus and counter-consensus that's been played out over this record, surrounding the current reviews of the film Pan's Labarynth - Mark Kermode on 5live yesterday called it the Citizen Kane of fantasy cinema and compared it to the Sistine Chapel, Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian saying it was coldly awesome but hard to connect with emotionally, and giving it a fence sitting 3 stars.