Smoke Fairies aka Jessica Davies and Katherine Blamire, are a progressive/retrospective UK mashup of classic english folk and deep american blues streams with breaths of high lonesome country musics. Formed as girlhood friends and realized while living in New Orleans and sponging the blues vibe found via creeping backwoods roadtrips and Hwy day drives, Smoke Fairies cross-breed lilting, eerie, and gorgeous dark english harmonies with textures of atmospheric fiddle, sinister slide and strummed acoustic guitar, banjo, and the occasional minimalist drums to form a sound wholly new, ancient, moody, beguiling, fresh and utterly haunting.
Smoke Fairies new Frozen Heart ep is available at Amazon and iTUNES
Sorry friends- Smoke Fairies manager has requested I take these tracks down even tho I advised them that i'd be posting 3 tracks when I requested a copy of the ep. Best of luck to them anyway. Please give them your money via tunes or Amazon. You'll be glad you did.Cheers y'all.
Smoke Fairies- Living With Ghosts
Smoke Fairies- Fences
Smoke Fairies- Frozen Heart
The Bonnevilles are a grimy punk-infected rocknsoulblues duo out of Lurgan. Bonnevilles guitarist/singer Andy McGibbon day job is boss of Lurgan's Motor Sound Records which represents a stable of underground (if there is such a thing anymore) outsider blues and garage outfits from around the globe (check out my review ofMotor Soundswicked compilationBlood On The Scratch Plate '65). With their new release Good Suits and Fightin' Boots, The Bonnevilles announce their arrival as a band to reckoned with, feared, and loved.
McGibbon's voice is a gritty, sexy, early Danny Auerbach-ian soul machine. His guitar sound swings thick, heavy, and as tasteful as a saws-all with a new blade, at once vicious and keen-edged. McGibbon keeps the vibe hangin' low, feedback full, and on-point exact. Drummer Chris McMullan's work is burly...soulful like ironwood and it tears at the seams of McGibbon's vintage pinstriped pocket, primally adding what's sonically required and vital. As a team they give each other the needful room the music requires to breath, grind, wail, and shake.
Shall we get on to the album? Let's shall. Hey! Bonnevilles! Who the fck starts out their first album with an instrumental? You do, ya bastards. That takes some cojones. But while Good Suits stands tall as a powerful eleven track filler-less collection of singles it also flows album-wise, weaving from the aforementioned instro One More Nail Outta Rock n' Rolls Coffin to the souped up garage stormer Army of One to the boogieass menace of title tracker Good Suits and Fightin' Boots. No Government, No Country, No King is a slow, tense politiblues burner which is followed by The Drag which sports a similar hot slow burning, if not sexier vibe and ends with the snip of a JFK speech. The centerpiece of this work, God Might Love Me (But He Doesn't Know Me Like The Devil Does) stands as one of the tracks I found myself playing repeatedly. McMullan's simple slow tribal toms match McGibbon's on-point grungy slide work to set a resigned yet menacing tone. Acoustic roots rocker I don't Like Whiskey is a blues redeemer. Super single C'Mon is a delicious hook filled head knocker and bottle buster with it's singalong chorus raisin' hell and fuss. The Belgians Are Coming is two minutes of Dick Dale-esque red tide dirty surf perfection. The set ends with the wicked live anthem Hardtale Lurgan Blues that smokes deep and hard from fit to fin. Like my man Dj Hillfunk says "it's a slow grower" but once I locked into the turbo charged souled-out grinding alt-blues sound of The Bonnevilles I was blown up and dusted. The Bonnevilles Good Suits and Fightin' Boots easily ranks high on my short list of best albums of the year.
You Will buy The Bonnevilles- Good Suits and Fightin' Boots HERE
The Bonnevilles- The Drag MP3 The Bonnevilles- C'Mon MP3 The Bonnevilles- God Might Love Me (But He Doesn't Know Me Like The Devil Does) MP3 The Bonneville- Hard Tail Lurgan Blues MP3
The TenFootPolecats are just another badass Deep Blues band outta Massachusetts. Thank Gawd! They have just released their first ep- a fine little five track affair of covers and I'm just in love with the thing. Drawing heavy influence from the low down,hard and creepy aspects of deep blues heroes like Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside, Hound Dog Taylor, Howlin' Wolf and others Ten Foot PoleCats bring the best elements of North Mississippi, Texas, Detroit, Memphis and elsewhere and channel it thru the dirty back bays and alley ways and side street bar holes of bad'assachusetts.
"...and what makes it so good is that everybody is original, everybody has their own taste of the blues. Their own feeling of the blues. Their own form of the blues. Told in that way, that's what makes it historical - it will never die."
We're actually up to about 1200 friends on FB, which is really cool. Thx y'all!
Watch This Space!
The Cure for The Purist.
WATCH iT!
Bad Luck & Trouble as Travelogue Webcast! W/ yr hosts Jeff Konkel & Roger Stolle, and an array of Who's Who in hard blues!
Truth.
"...authenticity without evolution isn't authenticity, but mimicry. And not terribly authentic or interesting at all." -Ted Drozdowski
Via Folio Weekly Magazine
My 15 Minutes..14...13...
And, of course, that is what all of this is -- all of this: the one song, ever changing, ever reincarnated, that speaks somehow from and to and for that which is ineffable within us and without us, that is both prayer and deliverance, folly and wisdom, that inspires us to dance or smile or simply to go on, senselessly, incomprehensibly, beatifically, in the face of mortality and the truth that our lives are more ill-writ, ill-rhymed and fleeting than any song, except perhaps those songs -- that song, endlesly reincarnated -- born of that truth, be it the moon and June of that truth, or the wordless blue moan, or the rotgut or the elegant poetry of it. That nameless black-hulled ship of Ulysses, that long black train, that Terraplane, that mystery train, that Rocket '88', that Buick 6 -- same journey, same miracle, same end and endlessness." -- Nick Tosches, Where Dead Voices Gather
"My songs, they have just the one chord, there's none of that fancy stuff you hear now, with lots of chords in one song. If I find another chord I leave it for another song." -Junior Kimbrough
Got this yet? You need two.
Broke & Hungry Records 5 year Retrospective! Must Own.