“It’s not enough for new album releases these days to crow that they’re the work of a single person. The novelty of a sole individual stitching together a trove of instruments and producing a handcrafted, free-range, conflict-free album has long since worn off. There needs to be more – some sort of hook to separate itself from the horde of other releases jockeying to gnaw at our aural pleasure centers. With a concept built around snake handling, Fire of the Spirit is the latest release by Paul Ravenwood, whose band Twilight Fauna is described as “a blackened-folk solo project devoted to telling the often forgotten stories of the Appalachian Mountains.”” Mountain folk don’t like no outsiders intrudin’.
