So long an insider-joking boy's-club dishing up dick-clutching discs by
the usual smug suspeckts — Will Oldham, Bill Callahan, Neil Michael
Hagerty — in some unending loop, Drag City's undergone a curious
makeover in the ought-four, the suspiciously silent Smog-in-parenthesis
giving up the stage for a slew of spotlit sisters similar only in their
empowered pipes: White Magic's Mira Billotte (of DC punk-soul sisters
Quix*o*tic), former Scissor-Girl/current piano-balladeer Azita Youssefi,
my harp-playing hero Joanna Newsom, and, most vocally dramatic of all,
Dawn McCarthy of San Franciscan duo Faun Fables. In thrall to
theatricality, McCarthy's artistry is bravely baroque, ditching dusky
dilettantism and digging deep in the dank dirt that dwells in the
darkest shadows of her aesthetic grotesquerie. Draping herself in
sinister images of girlhood, McCarthy takes cues from the eerie
kiddie-tales spun in "Picnic At Hanging Rock" and "Flowers in the Attic,"
then sets them to some sort of cobbled-together Eastern European
cabaret, or something, as her flamboyant voice betrays musical influence
drawn from the likely likes of Tom Waits and Diamanda Galas.
In a more direct nod, McCarthy covers a Brigitte Fontaine song; but where any
gothricky in Fontaine's canon — like L'Incendie, for example — is offset
by the audio adventurousness of her collaborateur Areski, whose
productions oft set Fontaine's destructive folksinging to austere
arrangements, McCarthy is never able to so reduce her palette, it never being
her wont to strip things down to simple simplicity. Favoring the
erotic, exuberant extravagance of the baroque, McCarthy applies layer
after layer of fanciful, frightful sound. Faun Fables are just a duo
(Dawn the Faun and Nils Frykdahl, as billed), yet their sound is
anything but spartan, the pair throwing all sorts of assorted bits into
McCarthy's licorice-black attack, eschewing the usual shades of
evoking-the-ghostly — i.e. the eerie qualities of silence — to toss
fruitier flavors into Faun Fables' mordant minor-key racket.
As the pages of this Family Album flick over, there's none of the usual ravages of time — bleeding sepias, blank eyes, opaque cakings of dust — that the long-dead children of old photos are normally dressed in. Instead, we have kids capriciously singing, birds calling, Eastern flutes
fluttering, banjos plucking, a discursion into programmed beats,
Frykdahl's affected Caveian groan as vocal co-star, and, of course, out
front, McCarthy indulging in operatic theatricks, wide-throat'd
yodeling, holy hymnals, and Polish musicals. And as Dawn the Faun sends
various skeletons tumbling out of her family's closet, this
disc's a bit like feeling the embrace of the family, its affected
affection seeming somewhat suffocating.
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