
BRIDGET HAYDEN AND THE APPARITIONS
Cold Blows The Rain (Basin Rock)
If Bridget Hayden’s previous, more experimental, work has toyed with guitar and drone to produce its mysterious squalls, Cold Blows The Rain is purely concerned with the flat drizzle of English folk songs. Explicitly inspired by the damp microclimes of Yorkshire’s Calder Valley and mum-sung standards of the Hayden household, it’s a slow and mournful album, a fixed palette of violin, harmonium and banjo clothing Hayden’s swooping and piercing vocals. Zero percussion, lots of precipitation.
Cold Blows The Rain is also a strange album. Its merciless lack of variety and pace creates its own glacial world, as if the town hall it was recorded in has seceded and spun outside of time. Incremental glimpses of nuance – the spectral backing vocals on Blackwater Side, The Unquiet Grave’s gently peaking strings – hit harder for all the desolation, glinting through like nervous sunshine. It can stop the heart, if not the rain.
words WILL STEEN