The Left Outsides - All That Remains

The Guardian 80

(Cardinal Fuzz)

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 Outsides are 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 (still on Bandcamp) 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.