Through Low Light And Trees is the debut album from the appropriately named Smoke Fairies. The fey folk behind this haunting album are Katherine Blamire and Jessica Davies, a duo who already have something of a musical history behind them. Having met at their Sussex school choir practices in the late ’90s, the pair bonded over a mutual fascination with their parents’ 1970′s record collections. Inspired by the likes of Crosby, Stills & Nash and the Grateful Dead, they developed their own unique brand of folk-blues over the course of a year studying in New Orleans, followed by jobs as car park attendants at the Sidmouth Folk Festival upon their return to England and a spell in Vancouver. It was in Canada that they laid down ideas for songs which would form the backbone of their self-released EP Living With Ghosts, which impressed a certain Jack White so much that he flew them to Nashville to record the ‘Gastown’ single, on which he accompanied them before releasing it on his own label.

The 11 songs that make up Through Low Light And Trees follow the same mercurial formula as the four acclaimed singles that precede it. Katherine and Jessica are entirely convincing in their roles as the eponymous fairies, their ethereal folk-vocal harmonies weaving in and out of each other, seductive and utterly bewitching. And it’s their guitars that put the smoke into Smoke Fairies; by turns complementing and contrasting those celestial harmonies… delicate, chiming, finger-pickingly good folk and hypnotic, looping, restrained blues riffery.

The album shimmers into view with the delicate, flickering ‘Summer Fades’, setting the atmosphere for everything that follows. Ghosts of music past flit through every gap in the intertwining harmonies. “Can you hold me like you held someone you shouldn’t have let go / can you keep me deep inside like the regrets that burnt a hole / can you love me like you loved someone you loved so long ago”. I swear I saw the spirit of Sandy Denny sparkling in there for a moment… It’s a truly beautiful opener and, as per the title, perfectly fitting for this early-September release.

‘Devil In My Mind’ introduces that blues undercurrent, raising the pressure and the temperature following the gentle opening. The repetitive riffs are heady and claustrophobic, but the vocals still soar free, never letting the song get dragged down into anything too dark.

‘Hotel Room’ picks the pace up further and is the highlight of the album. Drenched in a pungent, giddy atmosphere redolent of Woodstock itself, Hotel Room introduces a touch of psychedelia to proceedings. This is Smoke Fairies edging into Jefferson Airplane territory and it suits them well.

Things slow down a notch with the pretty but rather unassuming ‘Dragon’, before another album highlight creeps up on us in the guise of the haunting ode to yesterday, ‘Erie Lackawanna’. “Used to run through fields to put pennies on the track / now it’s just big houses with pools out back”.

‘Strange Moon Rising’ re-introduces the darker shade of rolling blues riff that anyone familiar with the album’s preceding singles will recognise, while ‘Morning Blues’, the epic ‘Storm Song’ and ‘Blue Skies Fall’ take on a more traditional, reflective vibe. Penultimate song ‘Feeling Is Turning Blue’ demonstrates that no matter how traditional their influences, what sets Smoke Fairies apart is their ability to take from the past and create something which still sounds decidedly modern. This song could fit as comfortably on the next PJ Harvey album as it might anything from the annals of yester-year. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the album was produced in Cornwall by Head, who has also filled in on production duties for Ms Harvey.

The album closes with a poignant, other-worldly ballad, ‘After The Rain’, and leaves us with words from a lost soul, paraphrasing a fairy tale, hanging in the air, “I don’t even know who is sleeping in my bed”.

Through Low Light And Trees is a beautifully crafted, rewarding album. Refined, enchanting, unworldly and heavily atmospheric, it’s everything the work of Fairies should be.