Four years in the making, Joanna Newsom’s fourth album once again blends art music and folk songs into something weird and beautiful and resonant. Apart from occasional drums, guitar, banjo or electric saw, it’s mostly just Newsom, who plays harp and a variety of keyboards while singing in that high, early-American soprano that either drives you to tears or out of the room. The title refers to aviators and frogmen—basically anyone willing to take a plunge. Last year, Newsom made her screen debut as the narrative voice in directorPaul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s California-noir novel, Inherent Vice. And Pynchon’s writerly voice still seems to hover in the background of the life-during-wartime songs “Anecdotes” and “Waltz of the 101st Lightborne.” Newsom, like Pynchon, is both a master of detail—especially when describing a variety of leave takings—and comfortably cosmic when unraveling the warp and woof of time and space, as on the glorious, symphonically enhanced closer, “Time, As a Symptom.” Divers also sometimes sounds like a meditation on New York City. The video for “Sapokanikan,” whose title refers to one of the Native American villages that predated the arrival of the Dutch to Manhattan, finds Newsom ambling around Greenwich Village as she sings about war and memory. “I’m certainly glad to be at home,” she sings on her adaptation of the traditional tune “Same Old Man.” “New York City continues on alone.” People move on above and below the waves on Divers, a record full of rare beauty and atypical insights from a Hollywood sophisticate. (Who knows? Maybe spouse Andy Samberg likes to stay up late discussing phenomenology.) A highlight is the Hunter-esque imagery at the end of “The Things I Say,” whose simple elegance is a great gateway to our greatest harpist/songwriter: “Our lives come easy and our lives come hard/ We carry them like a pack of cards/ Some we don’t use but we don’t discard/ but keep for a rainy day.”