Joanna Newsom: Divers (Drag City)

With Kate Bush on one shoulder, Tori Amos on the other and Bjork tucked away in a pocket somewhere, helium-voiced American Joanna Newsom has an impressive grab bag of influences. That she's starting to bear comparison with all three of those women in her own right is testament to her track record so far: this fourth studio album only increases the impression that she is becoming one of those lodestone artists whose influence attracts others to them.

Anecdote sets out the stall. With its ornate piano parts, orchestral fills, Newsom's trademark harp parts and equally distinctive vocals, it makes for a gloriously baroque opener. The video for the song which follows it, lead single Sapokanikan, is directed by sometime collaborator and darling of American indie cinema Paul Thomas Anderson, and its multi-dimensional lyrics are already the subject of much internet speculation. “The cause is Ozymandian/The map of Sapokanikan/Is sanded and bevelled/The land lone and levelled” is a typically chewy stanza (it's something to do with the Native Americans who first peopled what is now Manhattan). The folk-tinged title track is less ornate but just as gloriously rendered and, like everything else, cheerfully pretentious/deep. But as well as the fierce intellect there's a cock-eyed romanticism at play here which suggests Newsom is as much the heir of another original, Vic Chesnutt, as she is the author of Wuthering Heights or Venus As A Boy.