Smoke Fairies
Smoke Fairies: Not a fantastic name for a band, but we won’t let it detract from the music • which is eloquently strung and bathes in cool, shadowy light.
The Fairies are an effervescent duo hailing from Chichester; judging by their music, it wouldn’t have been fanciful to suggest they were raised in the swampy backwaters of Mississippi.
Imagine the rustic, bucolic panoramas of Britain blurred with the swarming, dense undergrowth of Bayou country America and you’ve got a clue of what to expect.
Jessica Davies and Katherine Blamire were friends since school and found a mutual appreciation in music. Naturally, they grew together and blossomed as one. And it is this spiritual matrimony which makes their music so unique.
Opener “Living with ghosts” is a soothing incantation that invokes spooky, spectral harmonies.
The alchemic fusion of bluesy-slide guitar and finger-picked folk is a starry twilight hymn, steeped in the darkness of night.
The album continues in the same spirit. “We had lost our minds” could fill the crumbling cathedrals of our fair Isle with its rousing, almost choral textures.
The only draw back to the album is the odd sense of deja-vu that reoccurs: It is almost as if the songs are ghosts of each other, if that makes any sense?!
However, this seamless blending could be seen as a positive; at times the structure becomes intangible and the music washes over you like the ebb and flow of a black sea tide.