Are you experiencing rock-club restlessness, dance party dizziness, or hip-hop-related heartburn? Have you found lately that you are more pallid than Jack White, uncharacteristically apathetic about the redundant re-return of The Rentals, or unusually snippy toward that annoying friend of yours from work who seems to be the only person who legitimately listens to Fatboy Slim and Chemical Brothers?
If so, then you might be suffering from an increasingly common disease known as Prodigious Art-Folk Withdrawal Syndrome (PAWS), an alarming ailment that affects thousands of college-to-middle-aged music fans around the world. PAWS results when repeated abuse of tepid, overwrought, and predictably-linear pop structures leads to severe ear atrophy and unrelenting cravings for a more cerebral, syllabically-stimulating, folk-bent art music.
Luckily, there's a new hope on the metaphor-mixed horizon:
Introducing Newsom (antidoxylamine HCl).
Newsom is a safe, non-non-habit-forming chamber folk artist, made publicly available in Europe later this summer, that you simply listen to once a day (or as directed by a record store clerk) for fast, effective, and long-lasting relief of the kind of alterna-tedium caused by PAWS. Newsom works by targeting specific areas in the brain that show a high response to the harp and chamber ensemble stimuli found on last year's excellent Drag City LP Ys as well as this year's Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band EP. In a recent study, subjects who were exposed to the kind of three-dimensional, vivid-yet-obscure story songs found in Newsom increased their ability to concentrate on 12+ minute pieces of music by 45%.
Side affects of Newsom are generally mild and include a shrill, raspy singing voice, an inflamed writ, a secret crush on the stately siren, and, in extreme cases, an increased desire to speak in Middle English (if you experience a bout of Middle English lasting more than four hours, you should stop listening to Newsom and consult your therapist).
Say goodbye to PAWS and hello to the harp-playing Newsom: the "plucky" singer/songwriter!
Newsom is available at the following locations:
