Cleaved from biographical information, it'd be easy to imagine The
Children's Hour as being some English duo whose ghost has been
resurrected from the distant misty fringes of the English folk
revival with some kind of 30-years-on reissue of their obscurist
music. You can almost imagine Davey Graham-penned liner notes talking
of how they, the boy/girl pair of them, cut a couple records before
ditching the rock-biz life for the joys of the country — just
like Anne Briggs, Vashti Bunyan, or any of those romantic figures
whose greatness is only magnified by their transience — to spend
subsequent decades in rural solitude. Blessed (or ballasted) with
biographical information, you learn that The Children's Hour's
boy/girl hail from this here and now — from Chicago, no less
— and have spent time on the road opening for the Billy
Corgan/Dave Pajo-communed silver-rockin' Zwan. The best bit about
such biography being that, even after you know it as fact, it still
seems incongruous with their music, which has absolutely naught to do
with any notion of Chicago scenesterism at all. With spare, largely
acoustic instrumentation, The Children's Hour take their cues from
that English folk revival, but do so as much in spirit as anything
else, their pretty tunes drawing from folk-song form and
traditionalist yearning to paint portraits of idyllic meadows from
hither to yon. With wailing singing reminiscent of such fringe
folkies as Magic Carpet songsmith Alisha Sufit and one-time Loren
Mazzacane Connors collaborateur Kath Bloom, Josephine Foster stirs
stirring life into every one of the odes herein, her boisterous voice
swooping and soaring like a kite caught at the top of the breeze,
simple sung songs like "The Lumberjack Song" and "The Chinese Song"
filled with the impelled life breathed into them by the bellows of
Foster's lungs. That The Children's Hour really are doing something
this pure and goodly in this here and now makes this disc a minor
revival unto itself — a precious possession, a prized pinup when
speaking of some folk-revival revival, astonishing and profound on
both its own artistic terms and, then, when placed in some larger
pop-cultural context. Outside of Alasdair Roberts' solo records, it's
unlikely any other record of recent years will stir up the
long-slumbering spirit of such a treasured time with such assured
grace.
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