Smoke Fairies/ Through Low Light And Trees

Smoke Fairies
Through Low Light And Trees
(V2/Co-Operative Music)

Folk music, everyone's doing it now, aren't they? Just like cocaine in the 1970s. Mind you, just because you can pluck a few acoustic strings and summon the pipes of Pan, it doesn't mean you're Fairport Convention - except in very, very rare cases. Ladies and softies, I give you a rare case: The Smoke Fairies and their completely authentic take on pastoral magic.
These two lasses were summoned by his Satanic Majesty Jack White recently, who produced their 2009 single 'River Song'. One year on and their debut album has lived up to the credentials: 'Through Low Light And Trees' is an expertly arranged, deeply enchanting and imaginatively infectious collection of bobbins.
The two lasses at the wheel, Katherine and Jessica, sing around and on top of each other - and whenever these two elements meet they release a powerful energy, making them the Large Hadron Colliders of the folk world. Songs breeze along like night time drives, leaving traces of poetic fear ('Hotel Room'), liberal romance ('Blue Skies Fall') and whiskey-soaked danger ('Strange Moon Rising').
On the one hand this is a late night hymn to the American outback: you can imagine seeing a coyote skull cooling in the desert breeze as drive past it. On the other hand, there's a very English sense of cold cottages and witchcraft going on too. It's a weird transatlantic contrast which perhaps shouldn't work, but hey! There's enough mist wafting around this album for the two styles to get lost, bump into each other, and forget who's who - just like Katherine and Jessica.