In Winter The Unthanks

• 1 In Winter's Night 02:16
• 2 O Tannenbaum 04:01
• 3 Dark December 04:40
• 4 Gower Wassail 05:13
• 5 The Holly and the Ivy 02:22
• 6 O Come All Ye Faithful 03:03
• 7 Carol of the Birds 03:07
• 8 Carol of the Beasts 03:52
• 9 The Cherry Tree Carol 04:14
• 10 Bleary Winter 03:43
• 11 In the Bleak Midwinter 01:47
• 12 The Snow It Melts the Soonest 04:45
• 13 God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen 02:27
• 14 Coventry Carol 03:15
• 15 River River 04:44
• 16 Nurse Emmanuel 03:48
• 17 Tar Barrel in Dale 04:21
• 18 Greatham 05:34
• 19 Dear Companions 04:05
• Total Runtime 01:11:17

Info for In Winter

Bittersweet. Beguiling. A mesmerising winter fantasia.

Recorded in one wintry week on the North York Moors, The Unthanks In Winter is an extensive, completist time-capsule of the season, featuring Christmas tunes known throughout the western world, mixed with the traditional and the newly written, all passed with great care and love through The Unthanks filter. With most pieces drifting into the next, In Winter is a dream-like winter fantasia, embracing both the dark and the light in the most ritualistic of seasons. Moving in and out of focus, like a memory, its a bittersweet hymnal to our shared winter experience.

Released on gatefold double vinyl and double CD, its the band’s sixteenth album but a world in itself, capturing the warmth and nostalgia of the festive season, the chill and darkness of the winter months, and the reflective ritualisms of the turn of the year; the end and beginning of the circle of life.

In typical magpie style, The Unthanks collect and reimagine. You will hear what a Tyneside band playing a German Christmas song in the style of The Beach Boys sounds like (O Tannenbaum); a Spanish carol performed by English folkies through the filter of Tom Waits (Carol Of The Birds); a French carol given desert blues menace, a newly written tribute to the NHS to the tune of O Holy Night (Nurse Emmanuel); an opening piece inspired by A Ceremony of Carols by Benjamin Britten (In Winter’s Night); traditional wassails and old stories coloured with folk noir and traces of Vincent Guaraldi’s Merry Christmas Charlie Brown.

“The Unthanks are capable of such beauty that sometimes I can hardly bear to listen to them.” - Martin Freeman

“There are few times when you discover a band and they stalk immediately to the heart of everything you love and hold dear.” - Maxine Peake

“They run from the very root of folk music to the very tip of the branch.” - Elvis Costello

“It’s quite a rare thing now. They’ve really got everything you could want from music. And I’m very fussy.” - Robert Wyatt

The Unthanks

The Unthanks
tell stories that capture children’s imaginations. They make music cutting edge enough to be BBC 6Music regulars and can also be found on Radios 2, 3 and 4, reframing history and drawing together the worlds of folk, jazz, orchestral, electronic and rock music. The believability of their storytelling is admired by some of our best storytellers – Mackenzie Crook, Elvis Costello, Maxine Peake, Nick Hornby, Martin Freeman, Robert Wyatt, Charles Hazelwood, Ben Myers and David Mitchell, to name a few. At the nucleus of a constantly evolving unit is the traditional upbringing of Tyneside sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank and the arrangements and writing of Barnsley composer, pianist and producer, Adrian McNally.

The Unthanks have been described as “a take on tradition that flips so effortlessly between jazz, classical, ambient and post-rock, it makes any attempt to put a label on them a waste of time”.

Using the traditional music of the North East of England as a starting point, the influence of Miles Davis, Steve Reich, Sufjan Stevens, Robert Wyatt, Antony & The Johnsons, King Crimson and Tom Waits makes The Unthanks a unique band, earning them a Mercury Music Prize nomination and international acclaim along the way.

This album contains no booklet.