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Folk, folk pop, folk punk, folk rock.

Now working entirely independently, communicating with their fans via their Patreon subscription page, Smoke Fairies, featuring Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies, wanted to strip things back to the raw nerves on Carried in Sound, their latest LP. The album draws on personal family experiences and explores themes of grief and loss but also inner strength, the result being a song cycle that, employing things like bin lids, old suitcases and a broken snare drum for percussion, digs deep into their often otherworldly sound and atmospherics.

Shimmering with almost medieval-sounding overlapping choral vocals, Vague Ideas opens the album with an incompatible relationship ending (“There was a vague idea that we might marry/Well fed but died back each year/You were on the bridge I crossed it with you/On the new bank we sensed the change/Others moved between us and we broke rank/You were hard to read/I was hard to gauge/And all the promises said with fingers crossed”).

That same aural soundscape permeates the heady Vanishing Line and its portentous lyrics (“Grey wings of grief/Death bird waking/Rising in bone/Skull cast in stone”) as the voices and instrumentation gather intensity as the narrator seeks to recapture a younger version of herself (“Paint me back in/To breathe in the air I’ve been missing”).

Carried on rumbling waves, the title track is the musical equivalent of sweeping the landscape with stroboscopic searchlights on a number, picking through enigmatic questions of self and identity (“When you look back will you know yourself in the way you’ve been known?/Clouded in the mirror when you’re standing alone…In the cold of the hallways of the life you remake/Did you soften your edges that sting at the core?/The pools of your history seeping under the door”).

Piano enters the musical narrative with the descending chords of There Was A Hope, another number of loss and unravelling (“There was a hope buried deep down/It clung to you/Destined to drown…Faded away and reabsorbed/Leaving no trace but a body that’s sore…It was alive but carried no weight/Just passing through with no body or face/Entangling us both tight”), the choral vocals flying on wings of regret. The metronomic chiming notes of  Seek It With Me return things to fingerpicked guitar colours with viola player Neil Walsh overlaying his parts as positivity is introduced (“I’ve got eyes on the clouds/Stirring up above/Shut the door to the storm/And fill this room with love”) embracing an unknown future (“Close our eyes and jump/And see where we shall flow”) rather than lamenting an unsalvageable past. An abridged instrumental, wordless vocals version closes the album.

The strummed nigh six-minute Sticks and Stones, with its electric guitar solo and bluesier vocal shades, is the album’s mid-way mark, music providing both shared experiences and the impetus to move forward (“I listen out for lines that comfort me/So that I know I’m not so strange/Hear them sung in song/And they really spur me on/To continue with my day”) and navigate the emotional flood tides that swell in the aftermath of an ending (“There is still time/To bring it back around but I feel it’s too hard too hard to start/With my TV on and the curtains draw/With my sticks and my stones/I’m building an ark/I have done my research I’ve read all the books/There is water rising and I’m clearing its path”).

The second leg is initiated with Part Of It All, a drone undertow, chiming guitar, viola and rubbed raw soulful vocals swaying in a slow waltz back into the unpredictable flow (“You are not alone, the world is full/Of changes that can’t be rationalized/Time, loss and envy weakens the mind/But I want to be a part of it all/And do it in my way”).

Regret isn’t yet ready to lay down its arms, however, and the stripped-back slow march 2002  is a heady, dense swirl through a mind in turmoil yearning for lost love and forgiveness (“I’ve not been doing right/You’re probably doing better/I’ve got dark thoughts to clear…Come back to see me/I’ve not changed my ways/I’m still terrible/Come back/Knock on my door/And you’ll realise/A good thing when you see it”).

Electric piano grounds the pulsing penultimate Perseus with its exposed and dreamily floating vocals, the title a reference to the constellation (“The brightest of them all”) in the northern sky, affording the number’s imagery and metaphors (“You strike at the night like a Scorpius sting/Meteor storms of a mind falling in…Orbiting beyond the wheels of the world/Some of us will always be drifting/Lost among the trails in the burn as they fall”). It ebbs to a close, ushering in the final song, the psychedelic sway, tentative piano notes and blurry drone of Come To My Mind, one of the first things they ever wrote and finally completed during the pandemic,  ending on a mélange of sorrowful resignation and self-empowered acceptance that, mulling over mistakes, goes from “My love is warm like a candle but you’ll never know/You’re a one man show” to “I’ve needed less since/I fell from the nest/And I’m not scared of being alone…My love is hiding in places that you’ll never go”.

Carried in Sound is an emotionally evocative album textured musically, vocally and lyrically with shadows and light, like a comforting flickering candle in the depth of darkness and storms; it’s easily the best thing that the Smoke Fairies have ever done.

Tracks:
01. Vague Ideas
02. Vanishing Line
03. Carried In Sound
04. There Was A Hope
05. Seek It With Me
06. Sticks And Stones
07. Part Of It All
08. 2002
09. Perseus
10. Come To My Mind
11. Seek It With Me (instrumental)

Staat er compleet op, 10% pars mee gepost. Met zeer veel dank aan de originele poster. Laat af en toe eens weten wat je van het album vindt. Altijd leuk, de mening van anderen. Oh ja, MP3 doe ik niet aan.

Full album:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvsYXqtYjMYdP9hCUavE4WF70R7kFkTQB