Music doesn't always need to grab you by the balls and ram obnoxious hooks down your throat to be effective. Sometimes just a careful melody and a particularly deft and comforting lyric can be enough to enrapture even the most jaded of listeners. Smoke Fairies are a british duo (school friends Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies) who play decidedly american folk music and do it very well indeed (bastion of taste Jack White is a confirmed fan) with some of the most beautiful and delicate melodies and harmonies you'll hear this year. This is darkly tinged acoustica informed lightly by the aesthetics of post-rock and electronica and the result is almost like a cross between Mazzy Star, Portishead and Bat For Lashes, in short it's gorgeous, sultry, sexy and more than a little dark.
The constant, hushed and haunted mood that permeates throughout the CD will be familiar to anyone who has spent time with Cat Powers 'Moon Pix' album or Mazzy Stars 'So Tonight The I Might See' and it's this prevalent mood that initially struck me. The music isn't particularly engaging or inventive (at least at first) but it's played in such a loose manner, it almost sounds like the duo are asleep, and I mean that as a beaming compliment. Putting their strongest foot forward with the hushed, spindly beauty of 'Summer Fades', a song which folds into life over gentle strings and expertly measured harmonies, always threatening to break but always holding just enough back to save it from breaking into melodrama.
And that's what makes this record so special, ponderous dream-scapes such as 'Devil In My Mind' and the spare, wanting grace of 'Blue Skies Fall' are built on the softest of foundations but the mournful melodies and poetic lyrics laced with romantic longing amount to more than the sum of their parts. It speaks volumes of the record that the strongest song is perhaps the slightest. 'Morning Blues' is a subtle acoustic ballad which wouldn't sound out of place on Neil Young's 'Harvest' or Nick Drakes 'Five Leaves Left' but those other-wordy harmonies lend a sorrow you won't find deeper anywhere else (but for the same albums solely acoustic closing number 'After The Rain', a song that could sing devils to sleep).
Overall I was pleasantly surprised by this then, the name and artwork left me now clues as to what I was to discover but I'm glad I took the journey. If you have the night to yourself, a few scented candles and a broken heart, you could do far worse.
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