(2018) The Left Outsides - All That Remains    


Review:
Folk means different things to different people, especially in the lengthening, brightening days of spring. To traditional folk-lovers, it means the maypole and the morris, and the buoyant regional revivals they are enjoying. To people who flirt with folk’s alternative edges, it’s more about the rituals of nature, as drones and strings build in tension, as rain falls and birdsong calls. The Left Outsidesare London-based husband and wife Alison Cotton and Mark Nicholas (the former the viola and harmonium player in mid-noughties folk-rockers The Eighteenth Day of May and John Peel indie favourites Saloon, the latter a multi-instrumentalist who was in Of Arrowe Hill, who call themselves “the most haunted group in England”). Their time with folk music proper has been brief, although their 2009 version of the Gower Wassail is stunning stuff, and the eerie psych-folk mood it conjured has prevailed in their music through the intervening years. The Left Outsides’ music generally evokes “chilly fields at dawn” they say, and they’re not wrong. All That Remains (Cardinal Fuzz) begins perkily for them, though, with The Unbroken Circle, its marching folk-rock charge tempered by lyrics about how small people are (“we have no control,” Nicholas warns gently, “seasons they change”). Naming Shadows Was Your Existence takes its foot off the gas, as this record regularly does, evoking the more pastoral moments of Birmingham psych-lovers Broadcast, before drones and strings weave a slowly thickening web of soft horror. Down to the Waterside is gentler, recalling the lights of the early 70s Canterbury scene, while The Yellow Wallpaper takes the gaslighting tale of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and fits it into a strangely bucolic English shape. This record drifts when you first hear it, beguiling you with its sweetness, before its shadows start to linger, and its darker moments eat you whole.


     


Track List:
01 - The Unbroken Circle
02 - Naming Shadows Was Your Existence
03 - The Ballad of Elm Tree Hill
04 - Down to the Waterside
05 - Clothed in Ivy Obscured by Dust
06 - All Those I Danced With Are Gone
07 - The Yellow Wallpaper
08 - All That Remains
09 - Take Me Home Again


Media Report:
Genre:  folk-rock, indie-folk
Country: London, UK
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits


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