Holiday songs aren't all jingling sleigh bells and glistening snowflakes. Elvis is having a blue Christmas without you. Bing Crosby won't make it home for the holiday after all. Grandma met her unfortunate end under the hooves of a reindeer.
British dream pop duo Smoke Fairies gets it. Sometimes Christmas is grey and lonely. "Christmas Without A Kiss" beautifully captures unfulfilled holiday wishes with moody vocals and distorted guitar. The song sounds like a Christmas carol stretched and warped like a half-melted string of lights.
"Christmas can put pressure on a person," Smoke Fairies' Jessica Davies told us in an email. "Pressure to be loved; pressure to share the holiday with someone special; pressure to have someone to go present shopping and cook a massive dinner for. When it doesn't quite work out how you hoped it would, it can make you want to hurl yourself on the ground into a pile of snow in resignation. That's what we tried to capture in this video."
Davies and bandmate Katherine Blamire peer through the darkness in the video, their faces covered in glitter like gaudy tree ornaments. They writhe and flail and fight through their gnarled holiday hymn. The very antithesis of a silent night.
Smoke Fairies' seasonally-themed album, Wild Winter, is out now.
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