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about
Our cover of the Shirley Collins recording of the traditional song 'Are You Going to Leave Me?'
Wrought from estuary-accented lichen, scrabbled from brine and moss, The Cold Spells emerged from the East London/Essex borders in the mid 2010s.
Their songs are modern laments filtered through electricity and concrete, where kitchen-sink psychedelia meets modern day folk. As indebted to the classic pop of the Beatles and Kinks as to the fragmented sound experiments of Broadcast and Arthur Russell, the Cold Spells attempt to make the familiar sound new and try to prove that there are still ways to get fresh fruit from an old tree.
Amidst the torrid stories, salted melodies, woodpecker beats, wheezing synths and knackered harmoniums, they’ve created a collection of vignettes into a time and space where magic is mundane and reality is distorted. It’s folkish music of outskirts, both geographically and in the sound’s persistent interplay of traditional song-craft and layers of digital effect oddities.
It’s not so much the ghost in the machine as the moss in the circuit board.
Shindig!… ‘The Cold Spells prove that it’s always the quiet ones you have to watch.’
Louder Than War… ‘Dark and atmospheric… geniuses in the art of matching serenity with anxiety.’
Monolith Cocktail… ‘a melodious pastoral-cosmic treasure’
Adapting their calculated standards into a raw, live setting, the radical UK folk duo rework six highlights from their spellbindincatalogue. Bandcamp New & Notable Dec 7, 2022