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Track Listings
| 1. Let Me Know |
| 2. Awake |
| 3. The Three Of Us |
| 4. Daylight |
| 5. Blood Speaks |
| 6. Take Me Down When You Go |
| 7. Feel It Coming Near |
| 8. Hideaway |
| 9. Version Of The Future |
| 10. Film Reel |
| 11. Radio Clicks On |
| 12. Bells |
| 13. The Wireless |
Product Description
Review
Heavily steeped in Americana, they lived in New Orleans for a culture-soaking sojourn, many years before the release of their debut album Through Low Light and Trees. And it was in Austin, Texas where they broke through with performances at the 2010 music conference South by Southwest.
Arguably more fascinating still is that, beneath the unassuming facade, they are international-class networkers who released a single on Jack White's Third Man label in 2009. It's not been a fleeting relationship: White asked them to be the support for his solo shows of 2012.
It's clear what White sees in them: there's a purity to their vocals from the moment Let Me Know opens this second album with some epic wailing in unison before it settles into a lolloping, echo-strewn lilt, not a million miles away from an under-produced Pierces. White might also have noted the doom-laden undertow to their lyrics; while if June Tabor were more worldly she might wrap herself around songs of betrayal and crushed hopes such as The Three of Us, the impossibly claustrophobic but unashamedly melodic Take Me Down When You Go ("something dies when you fall in love"), and the title-track.
Most of all, like White himself, for all their artistic questing, Smoke Fairies’ music could have been made at almost any time over the past 50 years. Indeed, only the slightly incongruous buzzsaw guitar to The Three of Us and the late-period Fleetwood Mac tendencies of Version of the Future suggest World War II has been and gone.
This quest for "authenticity" can undermine as much as it intrigues – Film Reel would have been the major beneficiary of some 21st century production oomph and Awake is tastefully restrained where it should be slightly unhinged. For all its charms, 2012 will certainly offer less one-paced albums than Blood Speaks.
Sometimes you wish they'd let themselves go a little more, but there's much here to adore.
--John Aizlewood
Find more music at the BBC This link will take you off Amazon in a new window
Customer Reviews
There is a muscular melancholy in the two singles positioned near the beginning of the album. `Let Me Know' is brief piece of thrusting, but controlled longing, while `The Three of Us' is a gutsy and expansive exploration of the impact of a journey upon relationships and identity, guitars and cymbals slashing through the swaggering rhythm section. The lyrics seem stark and functionally descriptive at first, until the tensions between the `three of us' explode into controlled frustration: `Could this be where we part?'
Between these two tracks, nestles `Awake', a sweet melody elevated to something special by the interplay of guitars and the crescendo of its instrumental conclusion. Lines like these could slip unnoticed, but shouldn't: `I woke too soon,/ Soft blinds of dawn in the morning./ The world so quiet./ Dreaming in ultraviolet./ Are you awake?/ Do you feel the space/ That was once filled by me/ Send shivers through the morning?'
The piano line woven through `Daylight' sways across the song, but its seductive dreaminess is quickly dislocated by an insistent metre and unsettling enquiries like: `Is there much further now, are you losing the meaning?' or ` Is this the year when we lose our direction?' The guitar line that follows appears jagged and directionless but adjusts itself cleverly to resolve the end of the song.... Read more ›
I consider the debut of Smoke Fairies one of the better cd I've listened to in the last two years and I hadn't high expectations on the second album, because experience has always told me that the sequel is newer so good as the first one.
Blood Speaks is really different. More bluesy and less folk has disoriented my expectations and hasn't fallen in the trap of the confrontation with the debut.
The class and inspiration is intact. Probably I will love it less than the previous one, but I feel the desire to listen to Blood Speaks really often.
The formula remains much the same, that now familiar melange of traditional English-rose folky voices and Delta blues motifs much to the fore, only a little darker and at times more strident than last time out.
The haunting "Awake", awash with sumptuous harmonies, "Feel It Coming Near", "Hideaway" and "Version of The Future" linger longest in the memory on first listen, whilst the title track suggests that The Roches might possibly be a guilty secret somewhere in the girls' music collection.
Two of the three bonus tracks on the Deluxe Edition, "Radio Clicks On" and "Bells", the latter building to an Enya-esque climax, are as good as anything else on the record, a refreshing break with convention that normally fails to see beyond the bare marketing opportunity of bunging on a few extra songs that otherwise wouldn't see the light of the day. The third bonus track "The Wireless" is slightly less memorable, though, and sounds like it could even have been an out-take from the first album.
The Smoke Fairies' highly distinctive style does make you wonder how long they can tread this same path without some kind of sharp turn to the right or left but, even without a song quite as satisfying as "Strange Moon Rising", this will do well enough for now.
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