Unthanks - In Winter (Gate) (Uk) [LP]

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, it's a bittersweet hymnal to our shared winter experience. Released on gatefold double vinyl and double CD, it's 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 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.