The Wire contributor Rob Young recently published a weighty tome on the history of British folk music titled Electric Eden (out in the U.S. in May). In it, Young expertly threads together the various manifestations of the genre and takes a look at how each successive generation has drawn on strands from the previous one, essentially mapping out a folk music version of Simon Reynolds' hardcore continuum. The book highlights how the root of many of those stylistic shifts stems from material aimed at children. At times this occurs through work like the traditional song "The Derby Ram", which Young uses as an example of how lyrics with a spiritual air often end up as kids' nursery rhymes; at others it's channeled from sources such as Oliver Postgate's children's TV shows "The Clangers" and "Pogles' Wood", which cast a considerable shadow over the Ghost Box/hauntology scene that emerged around the middle of the last decade.
New York-based English singer-songwriter Essie Jain has intuitively wired herself into that same ethos with the release of her third album, Until the Light of Morning. Jain has worked on the periphery of the contemporary folk scene since contributing to the Kill Rock Stars compilation The Sound the Hare Heard in 2006, but for this album she seems to have used all her prior recorded efforts as a cipher of sorts, a way of finding out what makes this music tick. In the sleeve notes Jain claims these songs were written after her friends started to have children; they all seemed to be searching for something appropriately soothing to get their little ones to sleep at night. And soothing it is-- both the vocals and arrangements produce a sense of being swaddled in a great surge of warmth, with Jain adroitly cushioning the listener from the real world.
So what we have here is an album of lullabies, just over half an hour in length, that features a mishmash of Jain's cottony voice and restful instrumental passages. The playing is sparse and tasteful, with Jon Mizrachi's spare taps of glockenspiel often providing the most appropriate counterpart to the snug vocals, while subtle touches of piano, bass, and guitar are slotted in at appropriate junctures. Jain is often compared to Sandy Denny, although her vocal work is less heavily accented, and there's a sense here that she is comfortably maturing into a style of her own. This she demonstrates on the first two tracks, from the soft cooing of "What a Big Wide World" to the higher range of "Lay Down". The latter is dripping in calm thanks to the light crisscrossing of voice and piano, in which Jain's simple invocations to sleep ultimately evolve into wordless humming as the track relaxes to a slumberous close.
There's nothing studied about this music, no attempt to awkwardly fit it into the freak-folk movement or anything else that could ostensibly win Jain any cool points. This creates a refreshing take on the genre, a return to its base tenets, via words that playfully reflect the habits of animals ("Falling Asleep") or high-pitched moans that conjure up bewitching imagery of the night sky ("The Magic Star"). Sometimes these two worlds are combined, with a few scattered words neatly conjoined to Jain's rudimentary mantras on "O, I Love You". Producer Patrick Glynn deserves credit for creating just the right sense of intimacy by keeping the vocals high in the mix, often making it feel like she's right there in the room with you.
