The Unthanks - In Winter - 2CD & Vinyl 2LP Formats

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 ritualism's of the turn of the year; the end and beginning of the circle of life.
In typical magpie style, The Unthanks collect and reimagine with deep musical intelligence, at once unique and familiar, inventive but natural and effortless. 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.
Sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank have been researching and idly harmonising to songs for a winter album that has been on the Unthank to-do list for 15 years, so it's little surprise that In Winter has a completist feel about it - a future classic of the Christmastime genre perhaps?

Rachel Unthank - voice; Becky Unthank - voice; Adrian McNally - pianos, harmonium, voice, lead voice on Nurse Emmanuel, drums on Dark December, Gower Wassail and Bleary Winter; Niopha Keegan - violin, viola on O Tannenbaum, voice; Chris Price - all guitars, voice, double bass on The Snow It Melts The Soonest, electric bass on Dear Companions; Dan Rogers - double bass except The Snow It Melts The Soonest, electric bass on O Tannenbaum, celeste on The Snow It Melts The Soonest, voice on Tar Barrel In Dale and O Come All Ye Faithful; Faye MacCalman - saxophone, clarinet, voice on Tar Barrel In Dale and O Come All Ye Faithful; Will Hammond - vibraphone, jingle bells, drums on O Tannenbaum, Carol Of The Beasts, Dear Companions, harmonium on Nurse Emmanuel, celeste on The Holly And The Ivy and Carol Of The Birds, voice on Tar Barrel In Dale and O Come All Ye Faithful; String Quartet on Snow It Melts The Soonest, Nurse Emmanuel and Dear Companions: Jane Nossek first violin; Niopha Keegan second violin; Chrissie Slater viola; Gabriel Waite cello.

Tracklisting:

Side One: 1. In Winter's Night / 2. O Tannenbaum / 3. Dark December / 4. Gower Wassail / 5. The Holly And The Ivy. 

Side Two: 1. O Come All Ye Faithful / 2. Carol Of The Birds / 3. Carol Of The Beasts / 4. The Cherry Tree Carol / 5. Bleary Winter.

Side Three: 1. In The Bleak Midwinter / 2. The Snow It Melts The Soonest / 3. God Rest Ye Merry 
Gentlemen / 4. Coventry Carol / 5. River River.

Side Four: 1. Nurse Emmanuel / 2. Tar Barrel In Dale / 3. Greatham / 4. Dear Companions