„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. Living life bravely, it suggests, should be our primary concern, despite the loss inherent in our very existence, whatever the obstacles lying in wait for us, however daunting it can often feel. These are startlingly beautiful, fiercely inventive songs, couched in the metaphysical, touching on the universal, born from a deeply personal place. Conveyed with sincerity, warmth and the musicianship and deep love of language and storytelling that sets – has always set – Joanna Newsom apart, Divers is a colossal achievement.“ (excerpt from James Skinner’s review in drownedinsound)
Like short stories forming a non-linear but narratively cohesive whole, the eleven songs on Divers travel from war zones to the wilderness, from a darkened coastline to a comfortable cottage in the hills. Their protagonists may be alive or dead, they may be ghosts or babies just born. Newsom is the omniscient but shifty narrator, speaking in an „I“ that both inhabits her characters and stands a bit apart from them, showing them up. Her deepest concerns are about the perils of fixing meaning. Like that other cultivated innocent, William Blake, Newsom senses a godlike mystery at the heart of the imaginative process and recognizes its parallel in the entropy of nature, what she calls, at the album’s climax, „the nullifying, defeating, negating, repeating joy of life.“ (npr)