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.
During the album's introduction, McCarthy sings a poem she wrote during winter 1998. She treats the invading winter like a new religion, something that changes the fabric of how life is lived. "It began with the cold/ How it crept up our sleeves," she intones, treating each word like drips of water that are nearly too cold to drop. "Covering the floor/ Making our blankets freeze." McCarthy uses that same text for "Hibernation Tales", the album's closer. In the intro, it's more of a recitative, where the words are sung simply and directly. But during "Hibernation Tales", a choir passes each lyric back and forth, repeatedly volleying their wintry realizations. The technique both humanizes and modernizes the esoteric work of Faun Fables. Suddenly, old American tales are pulled into the present.
These long-lost ways of life-- the flour miller, the woman sweeping her dirt floor, the pioneers of open plains-- seem somehow germane. As with The Transit Rider, McCarthy is making a point about our daily life now-- the constant struggle against the elements, our nature, and each other. This time, though, the band at her back gives that point hooks, rhythms, and textures instead, not just tangents. It's a welcome, if obvious, deviation for a band that's finally more than interesting.
