Faun Fables
Family Album
[Drag City; 2004]
Rating: 3.7
A Midsummer Night's Dream was never my favorite Shakespeare; I always preferred the familial intrigue of Hamlet or the blood-hungry mass-murders of Macbeth to the trivial shenanigans of lovers under a fairy's spell. Dream was even made into a musical recently-- which thankfully didn't stick-- but if the concept is ever revisited (and it surely will be: Broadway dudes love churning that stale butter), Faun Fables' Family Album would make a suitably awful soundtrack.
Faun Fables is the solo project of Dawn McCarthy (aka Dawn the Faun), who has taken the omnipresent folk revival of late to a more theatrical level, her joyful yodels and tongue-twisting chants setting the stage for absurd characters to frolic in their carefree madness. Family Album kicks off with "Eyes of a Bird", whose calm flute intro is shattered by McCarthy's wailing vocals. As the song progresses, she grows increasingly shrill (imagine the timbre of Beth Orton's folky drawl stretched to its claws-on-chalkboard extreme) while a second female voice provides distractingly dissonant harmonies. The song's final few minutes disintegrate into tribal grunts and wails, as if Dawn the Faun had gotten a little too near recent Animal Collective without grasping the intricacies that make it work. This transition from calm to chaos sets the stage for the play that's about to unfold: Hermia (in love with Lysander) has been promised to Demetrius, who has captured the heart of Hermia's best friend, Helena.
As the four lovers chase each other into the forest, McCarthy spins her tale into a hypnotic dream with the mellow "Poem 2" (yes, that is a glockenspiel), moaning, "Dig the magic from your grave," as the Puck she envisions spreads Oberon's magic juice on first one lover, then another. The story deteriorates into absolute mayhem as they awaken to find that their world no longer revolves around Hermia, and the two dashing lads turn to chase Helena instead. McCarthy mirrors Hermia's grief in a duet with Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's Nils Frykdahl, the song crescendoing into a frenzied shriek as her new reality finally sinks in. Song after song, McCarthy falls into that same trap, never allowing a melody to shine through before her vocals overpower it with extreme volume or overwhelming theatrics. Although she occasionally gives the lead to Frykdahl, her piercing attempts at harmonies completely fails to mesh with his almost-goth gruffness.
The lovers' inverted world can't last forever, and McCarthy coaxes them to sleep with the melodic lullaby "Preview" (one of the few songs, thankfully, that doesn't end in aggressive wails), sanding off the harsh edges of her grating soprano to coo a la-la-lullaby. Although it's never long before she lapses back into shrillness, this song is, I suppose, the best this record has to offer: It's just mellow enough as she murmurs perfect fifths over an arpeggiated guitar and autoharp. Unfortunately, the lulling calm of "Preview" is disrupted by "Higher", an adaptation of a traditional hymn that opens with a 30 year-old operatic recording of "Holiest Night" and deteriorates into a choral sing-along led by Dawn, complete with a distorted haunted house-styled organ. To top it off, after an all-too-serious delivery that's either intended to mimic or mock a church choir's lead soloist, McCarthy stretches to hit the final high octave note-- just like a real opera singer. (One should probably ignore the indulgent single applause that concludes this track.)
From there, the lovers' mayhem is sorted out: The quartet returns to town with the tongue-twisting "Carousel with Madonnas", and the triple-wedding (Duke Theseus weds Amazon queen Hippolyta) is conducted in front of a bonfire to a rhythmic near-rap translation of Brigitte Fontaine's "Eternal". While Family Album will never synch up a Midsummer film like the old Floyd/Oz trick, Faun Fables' folky theatrics are so histrionic that, whether intentional or not, Dawn the Faun McCarthy has created a soundtrack that mirrors the emotional upheavals of those carefree Shakespearean revelers. And therein lies the problem: While the play, like McCarthy's music, captures the hijinx of a drug-influenced summer night, there is very little depth beneath the surface, and at its conclusion, the lovers are back where they started, no better-- and no worse-- for having made the journey.
-Catherine Lewis, June 29, 2004
Review by Richie Unterberger
In the early '70s, there were numerous obscure British folk-rock albums with an out of time quality treading in mysticism. Family Album is like those albums, yet even more out of time in a way, considering there were very few artists on either major or indie labels doing anything like this in 2004. You get the feeling you've stumbled on a musical play in a forest that's enacting some mythical tragedy or epic adventure, though there's no actual central plot or story tying the songs together. Vintage British folk-rock is the musical touchstone, as many of the songs feature similar kinds of folky melodies with an ancient haunted (and sometimes morbid) quality, sounding as if they've drifted into modern times by mistake, as well as fairly acoustic-based instrumentation. It's atmospheric, but not all that enchanting: the songs can be overly precious, with a tense melodrama to the vocals and melodies that sometimes makes you feel like vocalist Dawn McCarthy is wrestling with an invisible demon the audience can't see. McCarthy sings most of the material in a high though not exceptional voice that again recalls many British folk-rock sirens of yore, occasionally stepping aside for collaborator Nils Frykdahl to take lead vocals in a less effective rough growl. The menu of storytelling-like songs is certainly varied, and it's not all folk-rock, going into opera and eerie gospel on "Higher," theatrical music that sounds like a combination of Judy Collins and Grace Slick on "Carousel With Madonnas," Nick Cave-like angst on Frykdahl's "Rising Din," and new wave-ish dance rhythms on the cover of Brigitte Fontaine's "Eternal." It all adds to the weirdness of a record that's genuinely strange, even if the results don't seem to match its ambitions.
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