Faun Fables is the long-running project of Dawn McCarthy; since 1999 it has been a vehicle for her brand of hippie, rustic folk, made with assistance from Nils Frykdahl, founding member of experimental rock group Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. While previous efforts have seen the pair riff on A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a play about trains, Born of the Sun is less thematically ambitious. Focusing on family and nature, it attempts to capture the joie de vivre of living a back-to-basics wild life, but mainly just sounds like a really crusty version of smug lifestyle bible Goop, with the pair singing poorly structured refrains such as “We never shower, we never shave / We just swim in the river and we never bathe” (good for you, guys!). And despite the off-the-beaten-track ethos, this ends up sounding rather pedestrian – there are shades of Stevie Nicks’ mystical crooning, but there is also yodelling and the sort of cacophonous jamming that’s only ever the slightest bit enjoyable if you’re holding one of the instruments.
