Based in the West Yorkshire cosmic mecca of Todmorden, known for its alternative music scene as much as its wild weather, Bridget Hayden and the Apparitions start the year with traditional songs as heavy as the sodden moors at midnight. They were inspired by her mother’s lulling singing and unfurl at a glacial pace, with analogue synths and delicate banjos buoying up Hayden’s deep, measured voice. The mood is largely one-note: slow, stoned and serious.
To sit in its stillness, however, can be a moving thing. In moments in Blackwater Side (well known from versions by Anne Briggs, Sandy Denny and Bert Jansch), Hayden conveys well the sleepy, post-coital pleasures of the “best part of the night” when her protagonist and “the Irish lad I spied” did “sport and play”. Images in the industrial revolution-era song Factory Girl are also conjured up with a languorous power, like the woman’s cheeks “red like the roses that bloom in the spring”.
Hayden has recorded a startling take on this song before, on 2019’s Soil and Song. Indeed, much of her previous work, including with noise-rockers the Vibracathedral Orchestra and on the experimental Folklore Tapes label, is much more dissonant and raw. The atmosphere on Cold Blows the Rain can feel samey in contrast, so it’s thrilling when it occasionally skips off its path.
Hayden’s wails provide a peculiar, mesmerising counterpoint to the Appalachian blues of Red Rocking Chair. When she sings further away from the mic on When I Was in My Prime, the sense of space in the Todfellows hall – the local community space where it was recorded – invites a tangible chilliness. The deep wheezes of Sam McLoughlin’s harmonium and the long bowed notes of Dan Bridgewood-Hill’s violin add further eerie shadows to this wintriest of albums.
Cold Blows the Rain is released on 10 January
Also out this month
Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis and Karine Polwart’s Looking for the Thread (Thirty Tigers) is a spirited collaboration of uplifting country, stark Irish songs such as the stunning Gràdh Geal Mo Chridhe (My Heart’s Bright Love) and bright originals (Polwart and Pippa Murphy’s You Know Where You Are is particularly beautiful). The second album to be released under the name of Parchman Prison Prayer, Another Mississippi Sunday Morning (Glitterbeat) has Tinariwen producer Ian Brennan recording the folk and blues sung at the prison’s Sunday gospel service. Especially powerful are the a capella Po’ Child and Open the Floodgates of Heaven (Let It Rain), recorded as a storm thunders outside. Weft by Blue Lake (Tonal Union), the moniker of artist and musician Jason Dungan, is a lovely instrumental balm, comprising four tracks of nylon-string guitar, piano, flute and clarinet and a dazzling three-minute finale on his 36-string zither.
Source: theguardian.com
