Send "Faun Fables " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Previous albums by Oakland folk benders Faun Fables often put the compelling lyrical ideas of founder and architect Dawn McCarthy in frames too baroque for the songs' good. The Transit Rider, the band's 2006 record, explored the woes and wonders that modern technology holds for our social existence. With subways, computers, and the Internet, our relationships might become more casual, McCarthy posited, and our encounters less meaningful. But willfully obtuse arrangements and overly intricate tangents often distracted from the themes, however engaging. And really, that's not surprising for a band that shares its multi-instrumentalist Nils Frykdahl (and his stentorian baritone) with mind-trippers Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.Faun Fables' fifth album, Light of a Vaster Dark, keys on the American prairie tales of writers likes Willa Cather and Laura Ingalls Wilder to explore the role of women in the early American Midwest. That might seem like an unlikely prompt for a band to reinvent itself, but, for Faun Fables, it's just that: Light of a Vaster Dark is as provocative musically as it is thematically, with rhythms and choruses that swell and arrangements that are smart because they stay out of the way. It's a pop reinvention, if you will, for a band whose intentions have often been subsumed by their own ambitions. Light of a Vaster Dark focuses specifically on the annals of women who powered families and generations with their quiet, steadfast labor. "Keeper of the keys with hidden worth," McCarthy sings on the strangely intoxicating "Housekeeper". "A tidy home will inherit the earth." McCarthy even writes her own old-fashioned work song, "Hear the Grinder Creak", a tune that turns the humdrum toil of flour-milling into a sort of survivalist mantra. Listen closely, though, and note the countering undercurrents: Heavily syncopated with handclaps and big drums, the song feels sexually suggestive. But ghastly harmonies and the moaning violin of Meredith Yayanos add a surfeit of foreboding, as though the labor wears on the singer with each cycle of the song. Indeed, McCarthy's examinations are more intricate than an issue of Good Housekeeping, as she plays on both the passions and perils that such hardscrabble times held for those that lived them. "Violet" muses on the seductive powers of Lena Lingard, one of the most intriguing characters in Cather's My Ántonia, with her deeply colored eyes and her "laughter, lazy and kind." The title track, on the other hand, depicts the universe as an eerie, consuming place, where body and soul are eventually surrendered....full text |
| Thelineofbestfit |
| You kind of know what to expect from an album by a band called Faun Fables, with a title like Light from a Vaster Dark and a cover like that, don’t you? Even before you press play on your listening device, you’re expecting a steady stream of new agey consciousness set to music, filled with references to the myths and legends of mother earth; right? And that’s sort of what transpires. But the lesson for me has been to give credit where it’s due – Light… is often an intriguing, even compelling listen which shouldn’t be dismissed too quickly as hippy nonsense. Faun Fables is more than just a band, it’s a ‘songtelling’ project, led by Washington State native Dawn McCarthy, which involves writing and theatre as well as music. The musical side these days is focused on Dawn and her collaborator Nils Frykdahl. This latest album, her fifth, is apparently a meditation on “the cyclical nature of light and darkness as revealed in the seasons of life.” I didn’t quite get that, but maybe I’m not in tune enough with the seasons, or didn’t spend enough time trying to decipher the lyrics. Musically, it makes for an interesting listen. McCarthy’s take on folk music sounds much more British than American. I know it’s a terrible cliché to mention The Wicker Man when reviewing an album like this, but I don’t have much of a frame of reference for this kind of music, and my mind couldn’t help drifting off to Summerisle. Often the songs sound like they could be centuries old, played the way they always have, until you realise that they’re all McCarthy originals. Overall, there are two things that kept my interest in this record. One is their arrangements, which succeed in sounding both ancient and modern – the form evokes ancient folk tales round innumerable village fires but expertly employs strings, woodwind and harmonica to take them out of a sepia-tinted past. The other is Dawn’s voice which is the driving force for all her songs, forceful but never overpowering, and on occasions the harmonies are to die for....full text |
| Uncut |
| A couple of weeks ago, I spent a day trying to sort out the CDs at home; attempting to make some space on the shelves, really, for the piles of stuff that had accumulated over the last year or so. As I was weeding out a lot of mediocre post-rock from the late ‘90s, I kept coming across good things I hadn’t played in years, like Judy Henske & Jerry Yester’s “Farewell Aldebaran”. Playing it, it struck me of how much it shared with a new record I’ve been playing a fair bit over the past month, “Light Of A Vaster Dark” by Faun Fables. I’m conscious of not having paid enough attention to Dawn McCarthy’s band over the years; stemming, perhaps, from receiving my first FF record in the same envelope as Joanna Newsom’s “Milk-Eyed Mender”. Both records had something nebulously medieval about them, though McCarthy’s voice couldn’t be much more different from that of Newsom, especially at that point in her career. Not unlike Henske, McCarthy’s voice is bold and stentorian, capable of fearsome power. She’s been one of Will Oldham’s duetting partners, with a similar complimentary heft to the likes of Ashley Webber and Lavinia Blackwall....full text |
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