NEW ALBUMS
BRIDGET HAYDEN AND THE APPARITIONS
Cold Blows The Rain
Trad folk songs, hauntingly interpreted. By Rob Young
BASIN ROCK
JANUARY 2025 TAKE 334
1 JULIAN COPE (P29) 2 SUN RA ARKESTRA (P30) 3 BROWN SPIRITS (P36) 4 THE LAST POETS (P38)
THE UNCUT GUIDE TO THIS MONTH’S KEY RELEASES
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’