Smoke Fairies - Blood Speaks
- Written by Kenny McMurtrie
A solid and weightier release from the girls of Smoke Fairies this time and ‘Three Of Us’ is a fantastic track, with its swooning vocals and simple but effective guitar solos. Whilst the video for that song looks to have been filmed by the sea either in East Anglia or along the south coast, it is the flat, near featureless landscapes passed through by train in a few sequences within it that the album as a whole seems to identify with. A sense of being in between one thing ending and another beginning pervades the work viz the line “There’s a version of the future hanging close above my head, but I can’t get to it” in track number nine, ‘Version Of The Future’.
It’s not often either that you hear falling in love being mentioned as something of a negative (unless maybe you’re reading some Michel Houellebecq) but, in ‘Take Me Down When You Go’, “something dies” when you do so. Not that that’s to say the tone of the work overall is negative. An almost childish curiosity about the world and what wonders one’s journey through it will hold seems to be the overarching theme of the album. The folkier elements of the duo’s sound are still very evident throughout but added to those is a heft of a darker hue, albeit one on a par with that found in a Grimm fairy tale.
This release then represents a significant step forward in the development of the talents behind it and should by rights raise the pair’s standing in the awareness of the wider music buying public in the coming months.