Smoke Fairies Carried in Sound Review: An Elegiac Echo of Life in Lockdown

Confined to a small townhouse during the early days of the pandemic, Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies embraced the limitations of lockdown, which offered them the opportunity for complete self-sufficiency as artists. With the exception of contributions from viola player Neil Walsh, almost everything you hear on Smoke Fairies’s Carried in Sound was created at their kitchen table with a single microphone and an old laptop. That these lush songs sound as good as they do, using rhythm tracks performed with sub-rudimentary gear like garbage can lids, is a testament to Blamire and Davies’s myriad skills as musicians.

As on Smoke Fairies’s previous releases, a sense of a unified creative voice is immediately apparent from Blamire and Davies’s folk-style vocal harmonies. This time around, the guitars work in unison in much the same way, weaving a rich tapestry of sound. The playing and tones are both tastefully considered, with subtly blended reverb and delay serving as the primary colors. The guitars comprise much of the sounds we hear, while retaining an elusive quality that even an umbrella term like “blues-folk” can’t adequately cover.

Drums are absent from some songs on Carried in Sound, and only featured sporadically in others. One might want for a greater variety of rhythms—especially on an album consisting of only 10 tracks that are slow in tempo and generally unchanging in style. But the focus here is Smoke Fairies’s use of melody and harmony. The duo’s arrangements allow space for the melodies to unfurl, resulting in myriad moods that keep the album from feeling too same-y.

The synergy between the music and lyrics similarly allows the mood of each song to be keenly felt. The lyrics flit between autobiography (“There was a vague idea that we might marry/Well fed but died back each year,” goes one line on “Vague Ideas”) and folk storytelling filled with rich imagery. The latter approach is particularly effective on songs that evoke the uncertain times of the pandemic, as on “Sticks and Stones,” whose lonely subject waits for the cover of nightfall to gather detritus in order to build an ark for the coming apocalypse.

There’s also humor and warmth in songs like “2002,” which features a mix of romanticism and earthy irreverence: “Come back to see me/Not changed my ways, I’m still terrible/Come back, knock on my door/And you’ll realize a good thing when you see it.” Indeed, Carried in Sound is deceptively varied set of songs that, both lyrically and sonically, resists easy categorization.