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Album Review

Smoke Fairies
Ghosts Music For Heroes

Article written by Ged M - Oct 18, 2013

Ghosts is the perfect title for this collection of the Smoke Fairies’ earliest recordings, capturing the spectral tone and haunting ethereality of what’s become their distinctive sound. But it might not always have been so; the second disc of this collection is well-recorded and nicely played but it’s far more conventional, as if someone thought they should sound more folky or even alt-country. You have the same harmonies and guitars but no sepulchral darkness.

The real treats are all on the first CD, compiling their earliest singles and EP from 2008-09. There you find the baroque folkpop of ‘Sunshine’, the stomping rhythms of ‘Frozen Hearts’ and the English-accented blues of ‘Living With Ghosts’. This draws on their time living in the American South, a place where the reverberations of history – social and personal – never stay in the past but infest the living like an unshakeable disease. Thus the sultry vocals of ‘Living With Ghosts’ smoulder with the pain of unfinished conversations as their guitars throb with the rhythms of unspent passions. It’s compelling listening, more so by being made by two women with fervid imaginations from so-sedate Chichester, and matched by ‘Fences’, that Velcro-fastens itself to your brain, and the harmony-strewn ‘We Had Lost Our Minds’.

If you only picked up on the Smoke Fairies with the V2/ Cooperative Music albums, or you want to know what got Richard Hawley and Jack White so excited, this is the place to come. But CD1 is the prize; CD2 shows the road that it was good they didn’t travel.

Links:
http://www.smokefairies.com/
https://www.facebook.com/SmokeFairies