Faun Fables - Albums Collection 1999-2010 (5CD) [Re-Up]

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Faun Fables - Albums Collection 1999-2010 (5CD) [Re-Up]

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Spokane, Washington-raised artist, dancer, and songwriter Dawn "The Faun" McCarthy formed Faun Fables in 1997. After a self-released debut, 1999's Early Song, her powerful voice, penchant for performance art, and British folk-infused rock with lyrics steeped in pagan imagery attracted the attention of Nils Frykdahl (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum). Frykdahl became a frequent collaborator, appearing on 2001's Mother Twilight. The following year, McCarthy premiered her musical The Transit Rider, with the accompanying soundtrack slated for later release. The duo issued Family Album that same year on Drag City Records, followed by the conceptual soundtrack album The Transit Rider, which finally saw release in 2006, four years after the musical. In 2008, the duo issued the culinary-themed EP A Table Forgotten, the first installment in McCarthy's exploration of women's roles in the home. Just in time for the transition to winter in 2010, Faun Fables released a second ambitious concept album (the first being The Transit Rider), this time reflecting weather and the seasons, entitled Light of a Vaster Dark. The duo then returned in 2016 with their sixth studio effort, Born of the Sun.

Biography by James Christopher Monger, Allmusic.com

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Faun Fables - Albums Collection 1999-2010 (5CD) [Re-Up]

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Faun Fables - Albums Collection 1999-2010 (5CD) [Re-Up]

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Dawn "the faun" McCarthy describes the songs on her 1998 debut as "near and dear to my heart; old traveling companions that helped me get around the big strange world." That sentiment rings true on the seven original and four traditional offerings on Early Song, a naked portrait of an artist in the making that's equally as naïve as it is powerful. Here McCarthy, always unafraid to experiment vocally, finds herself caught between the liquid crooning of Sarah McLachlan and the primal howl that would go on to define her later works. When she's on – the blissfully creepy "Old Village Churchyard" – there's no turning away, and it's all the more impressive when, in the case of the serpentine "Apple Trees," the song is self-penned. In fact, it's her words that shine the brightest here. The bawdy "Ode to Rejection," a nod to the blurry line between on-stage entertainer and off-stage human being that finds the protagonist musing, "I was ready to love you/Probably too soon/Took your sighs as yessin'/Let my wilds bloom," is both irreverent and sad, a lesson learned by a young wanderer forced to grow an inch with every mile. However, that same youthful approach stops versions of "O Death" and "Honey Baby Blues" dead in their tracks; the feeling may be there, but the lines in the face have yet to appear. Despite these misfires, Early Song succeeds because of its indifference to hitting any kind of target. Naïveté is infectious when in the hands of a future pagan goddess, and besides, you can't give listeners a line like "What bliss/With it I charge the very air" without leaving smiles on their faces.

Review by James Christopher Monger, Allmusic.com

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Faun Fables - Albums Collection 1999-2010 (5CD) [Re-Up]

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If they had been born 20 years earlier, the West Coast duo of Dawn "the faun" McCarthy and Nils Frykdahl would have been regulars at the Hotel California. Like two deserters from the British political punk group Crass taking refuge in the film The Wicker Man, Faun Fables are myth-making separatists with a Pagan agenda. To say that the songs on Mother Twilight reside in the ghostly predusk is an understatement, as they exist in a realm that transcends even the netherworld. McCarthy delivers each lyric like an incantation, often surprising herself with wordless sheep-calls and primeval yodeling. On the breathtaking "Sleepwalker," she seems as blissfully unaware as the protagonist, leaving the listener to carry the burden of her impending waking, and when she announces "my arms out before me, the bushes don't ignore me," it's more than apparent that she's long gone. Once out of the gate, the record plays like a dream diary, chronicling everything from conversations with moths to being chased by ambiguous beasts through the forest. Frykdahl's arsenal of instruments punctuates each new locale with a sense of urgency, often replying directly to McCarthy's melodies, then daring her to follow his. Mother Twilight can be a difficult listen; it's intense, evil, intimate, and brave, and those are adjectives that rarely apply to the serpentine world of modern music. Fans of Comus, the Incredible String Band, and early Dead Can Dance will find much to love here, but those who meet the evening with the door cracked, the light on, and the floor beneath the bed inspected need not embark on this journey.

Review by James Christopher Monger, Allmusic.com

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Faun Fables - Albums Collection 1999-2010 (5CD) [Re-Up]

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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.

Review by Richie Unterberger, Allmusic.com

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Faun Fables - Albums Collection 1999-2010 (5CD) [Re-Up]

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Given their back catalog, Faun Fables have created a singular musical universe, one that is evocative of other times, places, and eras. Transit Rider takes that enigmatic aesthetic to a new extreme – that last word cannot be overstated. Transit Rider is a truly obsessive song cycle and story that Dawn McCarthy developed for theater and performed in 2002, and has been resuscitated. She and Nils Frykdahl (the core of Faun Fables) have developed a traveling work that features four players, films and music from the band, and from other sources. This is an eerie work that draws on ages-old Anglo and Eastern European folk traditions, vanguard rock, the cabaret works of Kurt Weill, and the humor of Erik Satie. "Transit Theme" opens the 13-cut production as McCarthy sings, "I am a transit rider goings and comings at all hours, in the light and in the dark, wait for my train but don't have to park. I am a transit rider, goings and comings they're all the same…" She's accompanied by Frykdahl's guitar and backing vocals, her auto harp, percussion, and bass, and the strange sound of trumpets and violins that float and hover, denoting history, tradition, and their disappearances, as everything continues forward without purpose, without destination. Motion, space, time, dissolution, experience, and the edge of sanity are explored as the ebb and flow of continuance without cessation evolves and returns in a broken circle. The cover songs, "House Carpenter" for instance, is a traditional song that has many versions in which Jesus waits and celebrates the return of his lover Pan! On "In Speed," Frykdahl and McCarthy share vocals for different parts of a truly manic journey through fear that results in isolation and detachment, and sprinting away from anything that touches the transit rider beyond the quick witness of everything going by in a blur, the refrain "Let's speed up, without grace and running" with voices, howling, moaning, shouting, and operatically singing as the track goes off the rail and becomes unhinged with its nearly orchestral instrumentation. The set's longest tune immediately follows; "Taki Pejzaz (Such a Landscape)" was written in 1963 by the Polish songwriter Zygmunt Conieczny, from a poem by Antoni Szmidt and translated by McCarthy and Agnieszka Sowinski. Its haunting folk forms sweep through observations of the landscape as something to be seen, not felt, as the "tangling pine trees…stand mute and useless." The vanguard rock & roll burns itself into folk tradition with crashing tom toms, electric guitars, flutes, and more. McCarthy's nearly unbearable otherworldly alto voice chanting, wailing, and finally moving to contralto, is transformed but unaware. So is the transit rider, a virtual encyclopedia of seeing without knowing. One could argue the concept is overly done by the cycle's nadir, but that would be missing the point. The transit rider, who continually furthers the journey without getting anywhere, grows old without experiences. The music and the voices provide the darker and humorous side of such a life. In the final song, "I'd Like to Be," McCarthy and Frykdahl whimsically engage fantasy: "I'd like to be/like the wind/singing around…like the wind/and touch everything…." But it's flesh and blood moving through these thoughts without resembling them. Simple acoustic six- and twelve-string guitars sing this song, written by Souer Sourire, also from 1963. The transit rider finishes the journey where she started, admiring, escaping into thought, and ultimately seeking no destination but the spirit of motion itself. This one will test Faun Fables fans, but it is utterly wonderful, engaging, disturbing, and funny; it merely needs to be heard on its own terms. This is not so much freak- or acid-folk, as it is modern music, evolved from rock, folk and pop, composed and transformed into something all of its own creation.

Review by Thom Jurek, Allmusic.com

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Faun Fables - Albums Collection 1999-2010 (5CD) [Re-Up]

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The music of Faun Fables is linked, at least tangentially, to the British Isles folk explorations of the Watersons, Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, and Pentangle, along with nearly ancient strains of music from France and Hungary, all woven into a healthy dose of American primitivism, 21st century psychedelia, and modern production. Yet they sound like no one else. Light of a Vaster Dark is beguiling and intoxicating; it challenges the listener by demanding her attention in order to grasp the full spectrum of what is taking place musically and lyrically. Led by vocalist/songwriter/guitarist Dawn McCarthy and guitarist Nils Frykdahl, Faun Fables, this time out the band is aided by electric percussionist & violinist Meredith Yayanos, multi-instrumentalist Kirana Peyton, bass clarinetist & flutist Cornelius Boots, and harmonica player Mark Stikman. Light of a Vaster Dark, like 2006's The Transit Rider, is a conceptual work. It is a suite with both an intro and outro, 11 songs in four sets, separated by three interludes. It address weather (actual and internal) and its place in the seasons of life in literal and metaphorical terms. Certain songs, "Housekeeper," "Hollow in the Home," and "Hibernation Tales," are logical but otherworldly extensions of themes explored on their 2008 EP, A Table Forgotten, which looked at home and hearth as places of psychic adventure as well as rootedness and belonging. Here the metaphors are extended to shelter and and the longing for it. Moving from darkness toward light and back again, McCarthy's songs here engage both the fantastic and the mundane in their concerns, and the music plays with accepted notions of everything from Elizabethan folk and Eastern European modal traditions (the title track) to country rock ("Parade"). "On the Open Plains" uses a cacophony of tribal drums to carry otherwise a cappella voices across distances of time and space. This track gives way to the near pastoral dreamscape "Violet," with its lovely harmonica swells by Stikman underscoring McCarthy's lyrics. The chanted ritual song "Sweeping Spell" is populated with various percussion instruments; it illuminates the cyclical nature of this recording's themes. It describes a seemingly ordinary task that functions as an anchor in times of uncertainty and danger. "Hibernation Tales," illustrated by glockenspiel, gypsy, and classical violins, guitars, and organic percussion, brings this magical, moody, multivalently textured story to a glorious close with acceptance of the natural world's cycles. Light of a Vaster Dark is ultimately the most integrated, seamlessly rendered aural illustration of McCarthy's unique vision that Faun Fables has released to date.

Review by Thom Jurek, Allmusic.com