Album

Bridget Hayden and The Apparitions: Cold Blows The Rain

The Yorkshire Moors, wrote the novelist Emily Brontë, was a place to walk where your own nature would lead you. If only Emily had lived in the age of streaming and earbuds, she could have had the ideal soundtrack as she hiked away from the shadowy region, whose unsustaining vastness waxes drear. That soundtrack being Cold Blows The Rain, the first album prolific vocalist and freeform avant rocker Bridget Hayden has released with this trio, the Apparitions.

It’s difficult to escape the shadowy regions of the Calder Valley, as the prevailing climate – as the album title implies – is in a mostly minor mode. Fretting drizzle and smoky fogs. About a half hour’s drive south-west of the Brontë village of Haworth, just on the other side of the untamed moor that Emily took as the setting for her novel Wuthering Heights, lies Todmorden. 

It’s here in West Yorkshire that Hayden is based, along with the Todfellows’ Hall where these songs were recorded in 2022 and the Basin Rock label that’s now releasing them. Tod-morden: death and murder appear to be woven into the ancient cloth of its very name. And while there isn’t exactly a murder ballad among this batch of eight English and Irish traditional songs, there are plenty of wounded souls suffering terrible loss, and restless spirits whose graves were not dug deep enough. (…)

(…) The Apparitions are well named. The arrangements, sparse but never parched, are an ethereal blend of Hayden’s banjo, cello and synth; Sam Mcloughlin’s harmonium and Dan Bridgewood-Hill’s violin. On tunes like “When I Was In My Prime” and “Factory Girl”, plucked banjo stalks across vibrating strings and squeezed air, like a skeleton tiptoeing through a field of windblown grass.

By their nature, folk songs are like ghosts. They keep insisting on being sung, again and again, returning to haunt the singers who voice them, and we who listen. They seem to know us, adapting to our own times and our current ways of hearing. It’s only when they remain bogged down in customs and traditions that they seem smaller, under control, exorcised of their power. Perhaps it’s this that makes “The Unquiet Grave” such a perfect end note to this album. 

Appearing in the Child Ballads published in 1860, “The Unquiet Grave” is one of those archetypal works of folk art whose central mythology can be traced back to ancient Greek, Roman and Norse folklore. A dead woman’s spirit returns to tell her abandoned lover to pipe down after a year of wailing. Otherwise she can’t rest in peace. And he can’t join her in death, as he wishes, because then their hearts would wither away. Perversely, this mordant lyric is as much about living the earthly life to the full, even as it focuses on the minutiae of grief and loss. Scores of artists have recorded this song since the Second World War, yet by suppressing all sense of melodrama and focusing on the pure emotion of the situation, Hayden has pulled off one of the greatest renditions of them all.

Rob Young Uncut, January 2025