Smile Down Upon Us

Key tracks:

Tip Toe Through The Tulips
Girl Of A Skin Coloured Blanket No. 2
The Qookino Farm And Tractor Family Band

Label: Static Caravan

Read Description:

A smile stretching from London to Tokyo.

An open, playful attitude shines out of these songs, the fruit of a collaboration between two friends in London and a singer in Tokyo they found via Myspace (the three have yet to meet in the flesh). Flute, mandolin, wind chimes, a recorder, a sweet, sometimes whispering voice – this is the sort of magic music you wish you’d made at school instead of singing Three Blind Mice. If only “The Qookino Farm and Tractor Family Band” had been written in time to soundtrack one of those gently demented children’s animations of the 60s and 70s. Whistling, a marching beat, a tinkling banjo – and is that actually a bird cheeping? “A Girl Of A Skin Coloured Blanket” is the epitomy of magical modern electronic folk music. Their stupendously under-stated cover of “Tip-Toe Through The Tulips” is as sweet and lush as the spring fields they are delicately crossing.