For sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank, “In Winter” is not a Christmas album in the classic sense of the term: a project nurtured for 15 years, finally becoming a reality. Recorded over a week on the North Yorkshire Moors, Unthanks' double album celebrates the charm of the winter season while avoiding the cliche of festive celebrations in meeting places such as shopping centers and bars.
Producer and master of ceremonies Adrian McNally developed the material recorded by the two splendid women with dedication and complete freedom vocalistre-adapting traditional melodies with delicate piano phrasings (“In Winter's Night”), stirring in the European tradition and mixing it with the stars and stripes tradition (“O' Tannenbaum”), to the point of offering moments of authentic musical and poetic ecstasy in the spiritual and pagan “Dark December”: a restless and dark song where innocence and candor must deal with sad everyday life, while the entrance of Fay MacCalman and her clarinet shakes the shadows and It brings back some light.
The album's seventy minutes and nineteen tracks merge into a single body of music. The arrangements are streamlined, harmonious, but the unusual and the unexpected are always lurking: even when the Unthanks tackle more well-known songs, the intensity of the performance gives amazement. It so happens that a church choir introduces poignant piano notes, before the voices mention the famous “O Come All Ye Faithful”. A lullaby recovered from the Catalan tradition (“Carol Of The Birds”) and a turbulent composition by Bernard de La Monnoye (“Carol Of The Beasts”) stir the waters; the delightful instrumental body of the first song is echoed by a mischievous and unhealthy celebration of voices, bass, saxophone and a string quartet that explodes in a free-jazz finale that only Gregorian chant can reduce to reason.
Even the very famous “O Holy Night” is the subject of transfiguration, not only in the title, “Nurse Emmanuel”, but also in the content: a song of hope dedicated to those who were on the front line during the Covid period at the risk of their own life.
Equally persuasive and delicate, the spare “The Cherrry Tree Carol” and the romantic sequence of “In The Bleak Midwinter”/“The Snow It Melts The Soonest” make tangible that mixture of melancholy and acceptance that frames the suffering of those who remain alone, wrapped in the cold of winter. Even behind the familiar vibraphone notes of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” lie restlessness and anguish, not only that later evoked by the anxious “Coventry Garden”, but also that hinted at with a lighter step in “Gowen Wassail”.
Some compositions of “In Winter” are not tied to tradition, but are the fruit of the band's ingenuity. The first is a pleasant folk ballad written by Becky and her partner Aisley (“River River”), another is a tasty song for voices only written by the father of the two girls, George (“Tar Barrel In Dale”), a song that evokes memories of past popular festivals where, gathered around the fire of bonfires and among burning barrels of tar, we witnessed the performance of mimes, a tradition also recalled in the following track “Greatham”.
A bold challenge, that of “In Winter”. But for the Unthanks, winter is a constant topic in their artistic history. These 19 songs have the solemnity of winter, the spirituality of pagan rituality, the material inconsistency of a breath of wind, an intensity that is excellently contained in the last track, “Dear Companion”, performed by a choir of 60 items.
Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM