Curious Dreamers’ epic album Hushabye Lullabye (Music from the Original TV Series) is a startling reminder of melody’s power. The brainchild of Giles Lamb and Sacha Kelly, Hushabye Lullabye is a ten-track collection highlighting Lamb’s endlessly inventive songwriting gifts, focusing on simplicity, and Kelly’s five-star conceptual and presentational contributions. These aren’t recordings that bluster and bellow – their infectious accomplishments are life-affirming, instructive without heavy-handedness, and light on their musical feet. Hushabye Lullabye will likely get under your skin with a single listen.
The first track, “Goodnight Dreams”, sets an early standard. Piano and keyboards are musical lynchpins for these songs and duet with gorgeous vocals. The conversational directness of the lyrical content, coupled with well-chosen language, imbues the opener with surprising immediacy. It has a sleepy yet alluring sound. It brings us into Hushabye Lullabye‘s world with a gentle push and promises greatness to come.
Nonsense lyrics abound throughout “Chumble Bumble”, but listeners are unlikely to mind. The imaginative vocal melody helps make the singing a playful and satisfying experience. “Chumble Bumble” likewise contributes string sounds into the album’s potpourri that expands its flavor. “Bathtime Ducks” focuses on specific imagery listeners of any age will easily grasp, and unexpected intricacies worked into the vocal arrangement help make this a standout cut. The obvious bent towards children’s material isn’t restrictive for the Curious Dreamers project. The sheer inventiveness of the song’s melodic spectrum during its first quarter supplies a bevy of evidence supporting that.
Sunlight fills nearly every passage of the track “Summer Sunshine”. The light pours through in the multiple piano flourishes that Curious Dreamers layers throughout this cut, and the vocals likewise reach incandescent heights. Structuring the album’s track listing around the four seasons, reflected in four of the album’s ten song titles, strengthens the collection’s claim for being a significant standalone work. Conceptual trappings like this never risk pretentiousness and illustrate the project’s storytelling ambitions.
“Flutterbye Butterfly” sparkles with even greater delicacy. Lamb’s vast experience crafting instrumental music for television and movies doesn’t impede Curious Dreamer from entertainingly incorporating vocals. The singing for this track navigates a sinewy, often ascending pace without putting a step wrong. It bewitches listeners with its playful yet simple, time-tested magic. The languid near-psychedelic glow emanating from “Paper Boats” may be one of the highlights for many listeners. It will fly past the attention of more youthful listeners, but the hallucinatory dream-like aura surrounding this cut helps enhance its appeal.
The penultimate “Winter Snow” conjures the season’s sparkling glitter. However, it never sounds frozen but radiates light and calm in equal measure. We get a sense of things coming to a rest with this song without it ever sounding crassly obvious and the poetic flair of the lyrics is real without ever coming off as pretentious or inappropriate. The closer “Star Ballet” has an even more delicate and finely wrought architecture. It’s more suggestive than outright melodic like many of the project’s predecessors but works as a supremely evocative coda for Hushabye Lullabye. This is a spectacularly imaginative release that deserves any serious music fan’s consideration.
Cleopatra Patel