Back in 2021, I interviewed Fleet Foxes main man Robin Pecknold, who closed our chat on a typically earthly note. Pecknold remarked how so much of culture is an expression of geography. “I guess there’s a kind of terroir factor in music,” he said. “The music that comes out of you is a combination of your environment and tastes. That is the truest expression.”
Anyone reading about Todmorden-based musician Bridget Hayden might grasp this. Such has been the parallel drawn between her music and the blashy, slathery, nisly Calderdale climate that one might imagine Hayden as a weather vane made human. For sure there’s a parky and nitherin’ element to her work, though ironically, Cold Blows the Rain was made in summer 2022, when the weather was so good that Hayden’s band only recorded at sundown.
Eight songs form this new offering from an artist who’s spent years on the underground scene making sounds with guitar, vintage synths, vocals, flute and cello. She’s also part of the magical The Witches of Eagle Crag album for Folklore Tapes, an open-ended research project mixing myths and strange phenomena.
The song cycle here might raise eyebrows for some obvious choices. And when taking on the crown jewels of folk music, you’d best be sure to offer fresh intrigue. It’s a gamble either way – fail and face charges of lacking originality, succeed and have your impeccable source material to thank. In this case, it’s a success because the performances are so spellbinding that they wipe your memory clean of most other versions. It’s an album as distinct and vivid as its characters are dark and illusory.
Hayden is accompanied by the surefire duo of Sam McLoughlin on harmonium and Dan Bridgewood-Hill on violin, both known as The Apparitions herein. Apparitions indeed, for the spectres of lovers lost or deceived haunt this collection remorselessly. It’s like you know that ghosts don’t exist, but Hayden shows you them anyway. Her voice has a penetrating power, yet she often sings within herself for sirenic effect. The album’s sonic force is like a meeting of June Tabor, Laura Cannell and Alison Cotton.
Opening track Lovely On the Water has a solemn stillness of strings and elongation of sung phrases, as Hayden wrings out each drop of melody and meaning. Using just five of its many verses, the story is pared down to a pro-love, anti-war message. Blackwater Side, first heard in Ireland’s travelling community, finds Hayden backed by trilling banjo and a sonorous drone that really booms in your bones. She sings like someone made ecstatic by unrequited grief, conflicted with desires.
American folkies often took a prudish censoring line with Are You Going to Leave Me? Not so Hayden in this ominous slow dance, where purity and danger unite for a tale of unwanted pregnancy. Hayden’s vocal stays in stoical mode throughout, never committing to either rage or pain.
Whether ghost story or sensual tryst, She Moved Through the Fair oozes mystery here. The backcloth of McLoughlin’sharmonium lends a pulsing warble, for this is a tactile album where each instrument really shivers the timbres. Hayden’s plaintive cries raise your gooseflesh, her vibrato is like the wind through tree limbs.
Botany meets chastity on When I Was in My Prime as the album maintains its lost and wintry Eden vibe, its brooding watchfulness. No sudden rush into jiggery folkery here. Adapting just three verses, Hayden chooses to leave Factory Girl hanging on a romantic thread, where longer takes have asserted the girl’s independence or insecurity, depending on perspective.
Banjo and fiddle lines evoke canyons and creeks on Red Rocking Chair, amid wistful bluesy cadences befitting the song’s American South origins. The album’s last spooky embrace is The Unquiet Grave, wherein a mourner’s excessive grief disturbs the one at rest. “Your salted tears they trickle down/And wet my winding sheet,” chides the woman’s former lover, as The Apparitions make a sorrowful swell for Hayden to keen over. A line from this track also lends the album its weather-beaten title.
“Wind. Cold. A permanent weight to be braced under. And rain.” This was Ted Hughes on the Calder Valley back in 1979, a place once thought an uninhabitable wilderness. Hayden is now among those who prove that unique environmental factors can shape an artist’s character.
Cold Blows the Rain (10th January 2025) Basin Rock
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