It would be selling Joanna Newsom short to say she’s the victim of a headlong dive into her own hype. But after 2004’s superb The Milk-Eyed Mender, which was essentially a scattershot collection of her early primitive recordings, she skipped right past adolescence and into the yawning conceptuality of last year’s Ys. With songs ranging from seven to 16 minutes long, the disc is a patience-testing exercise in tedious pretence and suffocating overdubs (including arrangements by Van Dyke Parks, who apparently thought it would be a lark to completly obscure Newsom’s simple, pure, harp-bolstered melodies with sodden washes of chromatically chaotic orchestration.) But (and this is a big but) Newsom is still stunning live, when her simplest qualities rise to the top. This show promises to be more special than usual, with Newsom accompanied by the Austin Symphony Orchestra, one of only six such shows she’s playing in the U.S.