Pitchfork

Songs For the Young at Heart, compiled by Tindersticks' Stuart Staples and David Boulter, is the third attempt in the last couple of years to imagine a new kind of children's record. First out of the traps were St. Etienne, who released the Up the Wooden Hills as a bonus EP with 2005's Tales From Turnpike House. Then last year, Mick Cooke and Richard Colburn from Belle and Sebastian curated the fundraising compilation Colours Are Brighter, featuring Franz Ferdinand, Snow Patrol, and Flaming Lips.

All three offer distant echoes of UK indie pop's mid-80s revolt into innocence-- a generation of musicians who grew up with anoraks, fanzines, and flexi-discs wondering what kind of music to play to the kids of their own. As such, the differences between the records' peculiar romances of childhood are intriguing. St. Etienne imagined a psychedelic dayglo bubblefunk answer to Sesame Street's counting songs and alphabets. Belle and Sebastian and friends conjured up a peculiar Saturday morning jamboree-- equal parts Roald Dahl, A.A. Milne, and Craig McCracken.

But Staples and Boulter's record may be the most appealing-- to grown-ups at any rate. It certainly has the most heartfelt, singular vision, and it's the most profoundly, unashamedly nostalgic. It draws almost exclusively upon what Brits of a certain age know as the golden age of kids telly, from the mid-60s until the mid-80s, when the goggle box was no longer an alien presence in the UK living room, and not quite a ruthless marketing machine. "The Magic Roundabout", "Mary, Mungo and Midge", "Robinson Crusoe"... to some of us the titles alone are enough to have us careering aboard a Proustian rush back to 1973. In fact, the inescapable charm of the material has long been the stuff of tired observational comedy. And listening to covers of these old themes, rather than the versions polished smooth by familiarity and the fondness of memory, is not always a happy experience.

Former Catatonia singer Cerys Matthews makes a game attempt at "Jacky"'s "White Horses", but the original is such a delicately limpid dream of a song it really shouldn't have been messed with, and the synthesized brass only breaks the spell. And even Staples' sweetly crooned version of "Hushabye Mountain" is inevitably overshadowed by Bobbie Gentry-- or even Dick Van Dyke. The record is on surer ground with some avuncular cameos: Jarvis Cocker deadpans through Stanley Holloway's tale of "The Lion and Albert", Kurt Wagner is perfectly cast on "Inch Worm", Bonnie "Prince" Billy croaks through "Puff the Magic Dragon", while the Go-Betweens' Robert Forster is convincingly creepy on "Uncle Sigmund's Clockwork Storybook": "Did you know that smiling in your sleep/ Means there's secrets that you keep/ Locked in boxes in your head / Wise men find them when you're dead".

So many of these songs have a dark undertow, epitomized by Stuart Murdoch on "Florence's Sad Song", from "The Magic Roundabout", forlornly wondering "Shall we ever feel the sun again? Will the games we play end here?" As a record for children you can only imagine it must be a colossal downer (my own research, incidentally, suggests that Fisher-Price Aphex Twin dementia of the UK/Norwegian duo Toy is a more surefire hit with the under-fives). But once you realize that it's actually intended for terminally melancholic adults, things become clearer: Its natural home is the saloon rather than the nursery. It's a fine line between boozy sentimentality and the excruciating apprehension of your own loss of innocence, but the record really hits the mark on the one original song here, the closing "Hey, Don't You Cry", sighed by Staples over a simple acoustic guitar, building with glockenspiel and strings. "Everywhere you go, there are lines to follow" he mutters. "You know it's no race, some people shine for such a short time and then spend their days dreaming of that time." He's singing a lullaby, but it's to stop himself from crying.