Customer Reviews

Twelfth Night

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With the release of fifth album Twelfth Night, Brooklyn-based folk band Hem can add playing backup band to the Bard to their résumé. When Tony Award-winning director Daniel Sullivan and the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park program brought the much beloved romantic comedy to Central Park's Delacorte Theater this past summer, Hem brought the soundtrack.

It's the band's most lively and varied work by a country mile, but to call Twelfth Night a proper Hem album is a bit misleading. Sure, the evocative, familiar songcraft of Gary Maurer and Steve Curtis are all over the album, along with Dan Messé's lush string arrangements. The atmosphere and melody of "Come Away Death" echoes "We'll Meet Along the Way" from Hem's last album, Funnel Cloud, and stirring interlude "Not Too Fast! Soft Soft!" could be an outtake from 2004's Eveningland.

But instead of Hem's lead vocalist Sally Ellyson, it's the voices of the Twelfth Night cast members at the fore, including Anne Hathaway (The Devil Wears Prada, The Princess Diaries), and Broadway veterans Raúl Esparza and David Pittu. As Twelfth Night's fool Feste, Pittu's buoyant vocals carry "Mistress Mine" and "Hey Robin, Jolly Robin". Hathaway's efforts on the album are serviceable, but her only dazzler is a duet with Audra McDonald on "Full Phathom Five", a bonus track written by Messé and inspired by another Shakespeare classic, The Tempest. Esparza brings a passionate flair to his tunes, particularly the all-too-short "Where is Fancy Bred?"

Rather than providing the usual backing to Hem's acoustic folk-based originals, two full-bodied orchestras actually drive the songs of Twelfth Night. The Gowanus Radio Orchestra, which formed as Hem's touring band in 2006, and the Illyrian Marching Band (pseudonym for a rotating collection of Hem band members and classically trained musicians-for-hire) are co-credited on individual tracks.

Even removed from the Twelfth Night folio, the album's breadth of arrangements, from simple voice and guitar to full-blown orchestral reels, makes for a transporting listen, a stunning tableau of the mystical, fanciful, and intimate. Messé's combination of polkas, reels and aires hopscotches across European musical traditions, evoking a cosmopolitan air without being too crass or obvious.

28 tracks may seem like a lot to absorb, but many clock in less than a minute, and several are reinventions or variations on the same theme. Recommended for literary-minded fans of Hem, Over the Rhine, and the Decemberists.

This c.d. was awesome! The music is beautiful and goes so good with the play. My Shakespeare group is performing Twelfth Night and we will definitely use some of the songs from this for music between the scenes. It's too bad the songs aren't very long.

If you like Twelfth Night, this is a very fun cd to have. The feel of the music is spot on and the singers are all womderful.