Liquid Faeries

When I first looked up the LIQUID FAERIES album, Eggshells & Snake Leaves on the Internet, nothing helpful was coming up; so I entered the band name and album name together.  Amazingly, I got only about 20 hits on Google – by contrast, I got 18,100 hits for past UARB Blair 1523, and they are plenty obscure as well.  I suppose I spelled something wrong, because later on, I had hundreds of hits. 

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According to the eBay, Discogs, MusicStack, GEMM, cdandlp.com, and other listings given on similar sites, the bandmembers in Liquid Faeries – yet another all-female band – are Janette Staton (bass guitar, backing vocals), Ann Murrell (drums, keyboards, percussion) and Sarah E. Denham (guitar).  However, there is another bandmember also:  Kate Van Orden (lead vocals, guitar) – she is listed first on the back cover.  Apparently all of these sites copy from one another; only melodyuniverse shows Kate’s name also. 

I have seen many incompatible labels applied to their music:  new wave, goth rock, indie rock, and world music among them.  I have run across several outlets that have the same long promo using these music labels for the Liquid Faeries; it is bold and all caps and in German, and there are almost any as many exclamation points as there are words. 

The band was among several in an outfit called La-Di-Da Productions; I think they were also based in Brighton.  On a blog called CloudberryRecords.com, there is an interview with Mark “Sparky” Marrable, who was a member of another La-Di-Da band called How Many Beans Make Five.  He said that Liquid Faeries started out as four women; one male guitarist and bass player was added later.  Then after playing one gig with the band, Kate Van Orden asked Marrable to join so he could bring  “a commercial element to the songwriting”.  

Mark Marrable said of the demise of the Liquid Faeries:  “The band split when Ann (Suzanne) [Murrell] left and we replaced her with an over trained jazz drummer who couldn’t get the hang of it, and the two couples in the band also split!  Very messy.” 

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As can be seen, I have found out virtually nothing about this band, and it is frustrating.  The LP that I have was released on a Dutch label (Fundamental Records), but the band is evidently from Brighton in England.  The above EP, Milkstar came out on an Austrian label, as did the CD. 

But I can at least describe the music; indie rock fits for sure – the vocals float nicely above the dense keyboards and guitars.  The only thing “goth” about the music is that the repeated chords tend to be toward the bass end – the album isn’t at all gloomy.  It is a little late to be “new wave”; the album came out in 1990 and would be better characterized as alternative rock.  The album is quite cohesive, but the best songs I suppose would be “Raven Eyes”, “Carousel” and “Cocktails”. 

I have another album in my collection called Demonic Forces by a group called Shakti (not Shakti, the jazz-rock band of that name apparently) that has the same sort of Indian/Middle Eastern influences resonating through their music.  They might become a future UARB.