Sometimes you have to be in the right frame of mind to get an album. To my eternal shame, the first time I played this album, I wasn’t sure about it. Fast forward to a couple of listens later, and now I really can’t understand why I was initially resistant to its charms. But here I am, on a cold, wet and wintry night – admittedly no shortage of these here in Scotland – and I am now shamelessly begging you to check this out.
Now twenty years into their career, sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank have reportedly been researching and ‘idly harmonising’ (as opposed more formalised harmonising , I suppose, whatever that might be) songs to do for a winter album for 15 years. Christmas – however it is celebrated – can be a time of traditions being brought out again, even if in certain cases certain songs may have been heard rather too many times (this is unquestionably subjective, and it’s the season of good will, so I won’t share mine). As I’ve written many times, folk – which is the main idiom that the Unthanks work in – is a living and breathing thing, so while there are new songs written by the band, there are also carols that predate rock’n’roll by decades presented in a new light.
Clocking in at over seventy minutes, this album is nineteen songs long, and they really don’t put a foot wrong. It’s the band’s intention that this be listened to as a whole rather than cherry-picked. While that may be a challenge once any album is released out there, it is well worth doing so to pay tribute not just to the Unthanks’ intentions, but also to take in the entirety of the magic of this album. Bearing that in mind, I’ve been wondering what some of the highlights of the album might be. The tune of the American carol ‘O Holy Night‘ was taken to create a post-Covid thank you to the NHS and its workers, and became ‘Nurse Emmanuel,’ in conjunction with poet Vanessa Lampert. In lesser hands this could have ended badly, but those involved know exactly what they’re doing.
I’m also wowed by the radical reworkings of ‘The Holy And The Ivy‘ and ‘O Come All Ye Faithful.’ It must be said that the darkest of all Christmas carols ‘The Coventry Carol‘ is also stunning here in its terrible beauty which is even more spine-chilling than normal. It’s a particularly dark theme – dealing as it does with the massacre of the Innocents when a very threatened King Herod announced that all baby boys under two should be put to the sword. It doesn’t actually matter whether you have any religious belief or not, rather like the poem ‘Innocent’s Song‘ by Charles Causley, the whole idea is chilling, and brilliantly, er, executed.
The PR with this album politely suggests that this might be a future classic Christmas album. As there’s still over three weeks to Christmas at the time I write, may I politely suggest that the future starts now, and you get round to enjoying this rather brilliant album right now.
