Kristin Hersh
Murder, Misery and Then Goodnight
[4AD]
Rating: 7.5
First, you got your Raffi. Raffi writes and sings songs that drive all
the little kids wild, and most of these are about things like friendship,
spiders trying to build webs, and duckies trying to find their mamas. Kids
grow up listening to Raffi and they learn a thing or two about how an
ideal world works, with a few chuckles thrown in besides. But when Kristin
Hersh was a little girl growing up in Tennessee, her Daddy used to sing
her old-time Appalachian folk songs like "Three Nights Drunk" and
"What'll We Do With The Baby-o." The latter describes doing things to the
Baby-o like, oh, getting him loaded on gin, sticking fingers in his eyes,
and wrapping him up in a table cloth and flinging him around the farm.
Just what you want to hear when you're all snug in bed, right, Baby-o?
Murder, Misery and Then Goodnight is Hersh performing the traditional
folk songs she learned from her father, with her own kid lending vocals
and piano to a couple of tracks. It's also the first of 4AD's special
releases that are to be sold only via internet and mail order. Murder's
songs are to more sanitized lullabies what Grimm's fairy tails are to
Disney films-- women are killed, lovers commit suicide, and... well, you
already know what happens to the Baby-o. These are nasty, gothic tales cloaked
in the simple melodic archetypes of ancient folk music. And many of them are
beautiful.
Recorded very quickly after Strange Angels, this album has the same
instrumentation (mostly just Hersh and her guitar) and a similar overall
feel, though it's generally more upbeat and catchy. Her voice is perfect
for this material, buoyant and winking on the more upbeat tracks and deep
and throaty enough to give the darker material weight. And you have to
love hearing her adorable six- year- old son harmonizing with his mother,
giving his endorsement of these songs on behalf of first- graders
everywhere. He looks pretty happy on the jacket photo, too. I guess you
can hear this stuff before going to sleep and turn out fine after all.
-Mark Richard-San