Pitchfork

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.