If we were drawing up a list of the artists we’d most like to hear make a seasonal record, the Unthanks would be somewhere near the top. Their rich instrumentation, careful arrangements, and beautiful harmonies are just the warming sound needed as the nights draw in and the Christmas decorations go up. Happily, they have long had the same idea – for a full 15 years in fact, time that Rachel and Becky Unthank have spent collecting material and stashing away ideas until they felt ready to bring us In Winter.
Although it features plenty of carols and Christmas songs, In Winter is not a pure Christmas record as such, but an exploration of the darkest and coldest of the seasons, its bleakness and its beauty, and it was fittingly recorded during a wintry week in the North York Moors.
Plenty of the material is familiar – the likes of ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, ‘In The Bleak Midwinter’ and ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ get the Unthanks makeover. Others are borrowed like the German song ‘O Tannenbaum’ (given a flavour of Vincent Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack) or the less familiar ‘Bleary Winter’, a poem by Hugh Lupton that was put to music by Chris Wood. But there is also new material, with Becky penning River River and Dear Companions with her partner Ainslie Henderson, while the band’s musical director Adrian McNally contributes ‘Nurse Emmanuel’, a tribute to the NHS written with poet Vanessa Lambert.
The warmth of the Unthanks’ familiar sound – piano, violin, double bass, guitar and percussion under the harmonies – gets a few extra blankets with Faye MacCalman adding saxophone and clarinet, and Will Hammond bringing his vibraphone to the mix. At over an hour, In Winter is on the long side, but it is a fully immersive dive into the winter season, its celebrations and its challenges.
English
العربية
Nederlands
Français
Deutsch
Italiano
日本語
한국어
Русский
Español
Svenska
Türkçe
اردو
Tiếng Việt