Skip to main content

Smoke Fairies – Waiting For Something To Begin

One of the many stand-out songs from the Chichester-sired duo of
Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies' eponymous fourth album begins
with some far-off plainchant that ushers in the sort of gossamer-thin
atmospherics not heard since the back-packer trip-scape of All Saints'
Pure Shores. A low-slung guitar and a drum-beat that's part martial
mediaevalism, part Spectoresque wall-of-sound, gives way to a
self-reflective tale of small wonders, everyday epiphanies and fleeting
moments of shared joy.

Like some ancient madrigal fused with Me Generation confessional and
given a discreet post-modern sheen, Waiting For Something To Begin
belies any misplaced notions of kookiness the duo's name and image may
imply. At the heart of its textured melancholy and cut-glass
introspection is a shimmering sensuality possessed with strength and
power.

At moments Blamire and Davies' twin vocal recalls the equally spectral
work of Deirdre and Louise Rutkowski with 4AD records super-group This
Mortal Coil on their Filigree & Shadow and Blood albums, where this
very English form of folktronic gothic pastoralism wouldn't have
sounded out of place. As the centrepiece of an exquisite album, Waiting
For Something To Begin is a beguiling miniature masterpiece of yearning
and transcendence that whispers a beautiful truth.


Product magazine, December 2014, as part of Songs of 2014, co-written with Stewart Bremner, Sarah Busby and Simon Frith.

ends




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more