Smoke Fairies - Through Low Light and Trees
They're at the bottom of your clapped-out garden
Review
Debut album from Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies, Through Low Light and Trees is a work of dark, gentle, pretty-much mythical beauty. This pair of modern-day fairies have all the magical powers you'd expect of Tinkerbell's third cousins twice removed, and guitars. Reality endures in the Smoke Fairies' vision of the world, but it takes a whirl through an enchanted garden, and emerges tinged with a little magic.
'Hotel Room' is set in a gloomy, rain-drenched motel and has a baseline cooler than Samuel L. Jackson. An electric guitar sidles around, grunging the place up with its laidback noise, whilst the Fairies sing about daylight, striplights and glowing mornings piercing through the dreary darkness.
'Erie Lackawanna' is a heartbroken lovesong to the past. Aside from having an astonishingly cool title, the song features the unsettling refrain ”I can hear a wrecking ball coming for the house: See a wrecking ball – gonna tear it down“. It's a song that rages against everything bad about progress. That's sad-sack pessimism if ever we heard some.
Folklore and blues melt together in this unerringly modern album that exudes history and soul from every pore. These ladies are everything smoke fairies should be: ethereal, dusted in magic, yet rooted in the darkness of the real. If you're after some blues-fuelled, soulful sounds to ease you into Autumn, these are the women for you.
Through Low Light and Trees is out on 6th September.
Helen True
