Last year, the Children's Hour's SOS JFK album introduced the
world at large to the vivid vocals of Josephine Foster. Even though
they hail from Chicago, the duo mine a fine line in flowery
folk-revivalism, their gear sounding as if of another time and place,
having more in common with the commons and fields and magpie meadows of
English folk-revival records than with the windy city in which they
currently dwell. Central to such an evocative effect is Foster's pretty
presence, the songbird's singing fluttering over florid blossoms,
turning a wheeling wing to arc skyward, and seeming to toss and pitch on
the whimsy of the wind. And it's this voice that is center-stage,
again, in Born Heller, her other folkie duo.
Whilst the Children's Hour were already working with a largely stripped-down sound, Born Heller take this even further, sketching desolate environs whose Spartan strings cast settings that evoke darker visions, forsaking folk's
winsome woodland wonder to render those same woods as the eerie, spooky
tangles of trees into which folk wander and never return. In a more
modernist fashion, there's a certain kind of "experimentalism" present
in their songs, the tonal austerity of strummed mandolin and
deftly-bowed double-bass an arrangement on which the album leans often,
Born Heller essentially specializing in a solemn, modernist riff on
folk.
"Good Times" sets Foster's vocal at a distance whilst courting
discordance, its staccato mandolin and striking stabs of bowed
double-bass almost antagonistic, and the mournful "Mountain Song" is a
lamentation culminating in the repeated refrain "call me disappointed,"
where Foster's more restrained vocal is match'd with harmonic harmonies
from a shimmering violin. On "I Am a Guest in Here," the bass is struck
in intermittent strokes of creaks and moans whilst Foster flicks her
wrist over thrums of harp that keep a solemn tick-tock — these the
night-time sounds of an empty house, those the surrounds in which
Foster's star-cast wails (which hit almost self-descriptive metaphor
when she repeats "it flies like a kite/ it flies like a kite") stage what
is almost a soliloquy. "Pansies, Will You Ever Grow?" is, musically,
the most stark, dark arrangement, but this desolation works in wonderful
counter with Foster's singing, which is, here, at its most florid,
almost operatic in scope as she loses herself, and any inhibitions, in
the musical moment that the duo conjure.
Foster’s voice reminds me a lot of
Alicia Sufit, the Magic Carpet vocalist who cut a great solo record,
Love and the Maiden, in 1974. Tonally, the two don't quite match;
Sufit's singing more robust and reedy, Foster favoring fragility and
tremulous tremors; but there's a similarity in spirit which strikes me
every time I listen to the Children's Hour. In the barren environs of
Born Heller, it's not quite as striking, but in the album's one straight
folkie moment, the absolutely beautiful "The Left Garden," I'm reminded
of why I feel that way, as Foster's chirping voice trills recollected
tales of trips into a quaint kind of gardenesque anti-Eden hell, where
suffering and death are "the art of man that every animal knows."
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