Here's The Tender Coming

Geordie folk inventors Rachel Unthank and the Winterset are back with a name tweak (The Unthanks), revised line-up and a new album. Following on from their Mercury prize nomination for 2007's The Bairns, the new album and line-up adds strings, horns and most arrestingly of all, drums and percussion for a much more developed, layered sound this time around. Here's The Tender Coming is the usual Unthank mix of traditional songs, self-penned and songs written in the folk idiom - many imaginatively borrowed from writers little known outside the folk world and mostly from the North East of England. Yet this is not just folk - in Annachie Gordon there are overtones of Steve Reich Counterpoint, and the Beach Boys / Fleet Foxes playful harmony in opener Because he Was a Bonnie Lad. There are even shades of Antony and the Johnsons in the opening to 'flowers of the town' or the quietly shambolic eccentricity of Robert Wyatt in 'living by the water', and in 'lucky gilchrist' the playful joy of Sufjan Stevens. This is an album of depth and joy and the critics praised it.