‘Tamas’, one of the three essential life forces in eastern tradition, gets a real bad name these days. It is often interpreted as ‘darkness’, ‘laziness’, ‘destruction’ or ‘depression’. What a disservice.
Tamas, along with sattva and rajas – the three gunas – they ebb and flow and basically run the universe. Tamas is fundamental. In the right proportions, tamas is the great regulating force, the one that gives us rest, sleep, dissolution and leads us to regeneration and rebirth. It is our transition between states, a healing between worlds.
Why do I mention any of this? Because Bridget Hayden’s new album Cold Blows The Rain, a collection of haunting reinterpretations of traditional folk songs, is very much tamasic at heart. And that is something to be savoured.
Across its eight tracks of stark beauty, you are swept into a realm, a landscape, that summons eerie, ancestral energies. The arrangements are laid bare and embalmed in a hue that renders them, as one, supernatural and beguiling.
Bridget has written openly about her desire to write an album that would impress her ailing mother, herself a “very brilliant jewel” musically.
Bridget spent her childhood listening to her mother singing melancholic folk and blues. But the music that Bridget went on to make in later life was often markedly different. She worked with experimental noise drone band Vibracathedral Orchestra, chaotic shoegaze layersists The Telescopes and the freaky agit-psych rock outfit Sunburned Hand Of The Man, among others.
“She always used to say she didn’t understand what I did, or why I did it. She just saw that I was permanently on the breadline, in one precarious state after another, and that I did all this ‘dressed like a bag lady’”.
The efforts to impress on Cold Blows The Rain are executed thoughtfully, with acute, crafted dabs of artistry. There are no flashy moves or cries for attention. Far from it. Fine lines of sonic ambience resonate and pervade like the silent morning sun on frosted fields. It is refined, discerning stuff throughout.
The album, recorded over two days at The Todfellows Space, is engraved with various narratives around themes of love, lament and discontent. Album closer The Unquiet Grave (also encountered in traditional lore as Cold Blows The Wind) is gloriously extreme on the matter – the tale of a young man who grieves so much for his deceased true love that she is woken from her eternal sleep.
Bridget and her band, The Apparitions – Dan Bridgewood-Hill and Sam McLoughlin – maintain a consistent approach to song structure. In some ways the album feels like a single composition of eight movements.
For each track, a harmonium drone sits beneath plucked banjo, delicately dancing, paving way for the lead melody, while ghostly shapes of backing vocals add hushed-yet-lavish texture. For tension, sombre strings stretch out the aching to breaking point, but in doing so, reveal a space in which the album’s emotions unravel and appear more friend than foe.
Bridget’s voice is given centre stage throughout and rightly so. The sentiment of each lyric is emblazoned in her every note.
Bridget’s mother listened to the album, at first not knowing the artist behind it, and was indeed impressed. She died before the album was released. As Bridget describes of her passing:
“I felt her, floating above the tragic scene, at last released from the pain of the aging body, free floating and pure in spirit. So I dedicate this record to her and her memory, and release it in gratitude for all that she taught me. I forgive her for all her flaws, and I look forward to being with her again in some other life time.”
The album, to me at least, contains real tenderness and hope. It’s not always all that obvious, shrouded beneath the ethereal mists, but sit quietly and explore and you’ll find comfort, resolution and enduring beauty.
Cold Blows The Rain is out now on Todmorden label Basin Rock.
Follow Bridget on Instagram – @notwavingordrowning
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