Tag: In Winter

Things get well underway for the seasonal releases as The Unthanks deliver a double album of new and traditional festive sounds, many of the tracks flowing seamlessly from one to the next without breaks in the music. Recorded over the space of one wintry week on the North York Moors and released alongside the supporting tour they call In Winter “a dream-like winter fantasia, embracing both the dark and the light in the most ritualistic of seasons”. With Adrian McNally on drums, harmonium and celeste, double bassist Dan Rogers, guitarist Chris Price, Will Hammond on vibraphone, Faye MacCalman on sax and clarinet and violinist Niopha Keegan, it expands their familiar piano-based style for a fuller sound, it opens with the wind introducing McNally’s piano instrumental ‘In Winter’s Night’, inspired by but not sounding like Benjamin Britten’s ‘In Freezing Winter Night’, the door slamming to shut out the storm before we hear footsteps crunching snow into the German traditional ‘O Tannenbaum’ reimagined based around the unlikely combination of Vincent Guaraldi’s harmonic piano playing from Merry Christmas Charlie Brown and the Beach Boys with Keegan on viola. The 8-piece band conjuring thoughts of Procol Harum, the subsequent ‘Dark December’ is an arrangement of Graeme Miles 1964 song, pruning it three rather than five verses, the first phrase repeated like an incantation.

Turning to homecrafted traditionals, the five-minute ‘Gower Wassail’ is less sprightly and more of a galumphing trudge than you’d expect from a number about revellers going from house to house in search of beer, cheese, etc., here driven by guitar, bass, vibes and hollow drums with clarinet and violin adding their own courtly colours.

That’s followed by a flurry of carols, first up being an instrumental rendition of ‘The Holly And The Ivy’ with clarinet and Hammond on celeste, that giving way to more sound samples that herald ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, again arranged for a slow, melancholic pace, the voices not arriving until almost the end, simply looping its single opening line. The traditional Catalan lullaby ‘Carol Of The Birds’ is whisperingly sung to capture the song’s fragility, the cello echoing the number’s popularisation by Pau Casals and is, aptly, succeeded by ‘Carl Of The Beasts’, written in the late 1600s by French poet and lawyer Bernard de La Monnoye and more commonly known ‘The Burgundian Carol’, though here following its renaming by Pete Seeger and, in keeping with the animal associations, letting it (moderately) rip while being underpinned by heavy pizzicato bass. The final one in this stretch is the keyboards arrangement of ‘The Cherry Tree Carol’, slow waltzing like a music hall ballad through the story of how the tree bends down to offer Mary its fruit.

Taking a break from the traditional repertoire, the sparsely sung and arranged with clarinet brushes ‘Bleary Winter’ is Chris Wood’s setting of the poem by Hugh Lupton, actually a protest against the Enclosures Acts, then it’s back to the carol sheet for a brief harmonium droned keyboard instrumental ‘In The Bleak Midwinter’ and the traditional (though far from Christmassy) ‘The Snow It Melts The Soonest’ with Rachel fully conjuring its bleak despair.

There’s another brace of carols with, preceded by tolling bells and carol singers, a vibraphone arrangement of ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ and then Keegan’s harmonium wheezing drone minimalist arrangement of that dark masterpiece ‘Coventry Carol’ telling of the Massacre Of The Innocents.

The first of two new Becky Unthank numbers, the plucked guitar, harmonium drone spare ‘River, River’, co-penned with Ainslie Henderson, stems from their walking by the river near their house in Northumberland when their son was just two, before McNally shares lead with Rachel on the violin-caressed ‘Nurse Emmanuel’, a co-write with Vanessa Lampert which, set to the tune of ‘O Holy Night’ is a swelling tribute to the NHS. Then, making this a family affair, the unaccompanied ‘Tar Barrel In Dale’ is a song written by their father George relating local New Year’s Eve tradition wherein men born in the village dress up and parade round with flaming tar barrels on their heads which are then flung on to a village square bonfire.

The last traditional tune is ‘Greatham’, from the village mummer’s play and sword dance performed every Boxing Day, the recording, arranged for keyboards and violin, an abstract revisiting of ‘Greatham Calling On Song’ off their debut album, weaving together some of the lyrics and the melody of ‘Dingle’s Regatta’ which is played for the dance. And so it ends with a full 60 voices, recorded at the band’s residentials, and string quartet coming together for Becky and Ainslie’s anthemic parting song ‘Dear Companion’ set to the Nettleton tune of the hymn ‘Come Thou Fount Of Every Blessing’. A Winter wonderland, indeed.

Mike Davies

Artists’ website: www.the-unthanks.com

‘River River’ – official video: