The Left Outsides - All That Remains (2018)

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.

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.

May also brings some bouncier moments. Kacy & Clayton’s The Siren’s Song (New West), finally released in the UK, is folk-rock siphoned through west coast sunshine, immaculately produced by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy. Aidan O’Rourke from Lau’s 365: Volume I is an interesting exercise in music responding to James Robertson’s short stories, inspiring some beautiful nuggets from O’Rourke and Mercury-nominated piano/harmonium player Kit Downes. Will Pound’s Through the Seasons: A Year in Folk Dance (Lulubug) is full of gleeful renditions of traditional songs on melodeon, fiddle and banjo, while the gorgeous playing on Moore, Moss and Rutter’s III (Hudson), showcases folk instrumentals in new skins, glistening with a fresh power.