Album: Bridget Hayden and The Apparitions - Cold Blows The Rain

The title Cold Blows The Rain encapsulates it. A mournful, unembellished female voice sings of loss. The musical backing is sparse. Rhythms are measured. Nothing is hurried. If this album was a weather forecast, it would predict impenetrable mist followed by cold rain and wind. Then, more mist.

This is Bridget Hayden’s first album which can clearly be defined as folk. Since the late 1990s, her music has been experimental, impressionistic – most often made with Schism and Vibracathedral Orchestra. She has also played and recorded with edgy shoegazers The Telescopes. Tellingly for Cold Blows The Rain, another venture is recording for the Folklore Tapes set up. Here, she is accompanied by The Apparitions: Dan Bridgewood-Hill (violin) and Sam McLoughlin (harmonium). As well as singing, Hayden plays banjo, cello and synthesiser (employed discreetly as a form of sound wash). Recorded in West Yorkshire over two days in August 2022, Cold Blows The Rain is ghostly, sounding as if spectres were performing inside a reverberant cave.

Most of the English folk songs chosen are familiar. There are already many adaptations of each. Steeleye Span’s version of “Lovely on the Water” is probably the best known. Particularly stylistically resonant are Anne Briggs’ interpretations of “Blackwater Side” and “When I Was in my Prime" (the latter as “Let no Man Steal Your Thyme”). On the 1970 album Love, Death & the Lady, made with her sister Dolly, Shirley Collins sang “Are You Going to Leave me” – another indication of Cold Blows The Rain’s tenor. Collins has also recorded “The Unquiet Grave.” Both Briggs and Collins have tackled “She Moved Through the Fayre.” More recently, Radie Peat, now of Lankum, duetted with Lisa O’Neill on “The Factory Girl” for the latter’s Heard a Long Gone Song album (released in 2018). The only aesthetic outlier on Cold Blows The Rain is “Red Rocking Chair,” usually categorised as a blues (Dock Boggs recorded it as "Sugar Baby" in 1927).

Choosing this material indicates that Hayden is stepping into a very particular continuum – one largely defined by Anne Briggs and Shirley Collins at their most desolate.

All of which raises the question of whether further readings of any of these songs are needed. New recordings of “Blackwater Side” and “She Moved Through the Fayre” could be analogous to a yet-another garage-band romp though “Louie Louie.” However – and it’s a big however – in the context of this album each assured new interpretation is integral to the whole, vital to what overall is an affecting mood piece. Cold Blows The Rain is about the individual songs. But, more importantly, it is also about the melancholy evoked by its full 45 minutes.

• More new music reviews on theartsdesk
• Kieron Tyler’s website

@kierontyler.bsky.social