The Unthanks are difficult to categorise. Nominally a folk act from Northumberland (where vocalists Becky and Rachel originate, though keyboardist and musical director Adrian McNally hails from Barnsley), they arguably left folk behind several albums ago, when covers by the likes of Robert Wyatt and (even) King Crimson began to interrupt the ‘Trad. Arr’ flow. And when the band (if we can call them that, though ‘aggregation’ might be more appropriate) moved on to concept albums about the decline of the shipping industry and the Hull trawler boat tragedy of 1968, it became even harder to decide what variant of folk we were dealing with - progressive folk? Post-folk? Ah, well, for ease of reference, ‘folk’ will still have to do….
More recent projects have been similarly unpredictable - an album that combined the songs of Wyatt with those of Anthony and the Johnsons and, perhaps most surprisingly of all, two albums that mined the obscure (by choice) songwriting legacy of Molly Drake, mother of the now-legendary singer-songwriter Nick.
So, the current Unthank project may at first sight seem a little less startling than its immediate forebears - a song cycle based on the poetry of Emily Bronte, composed with the co-operation of the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth. The author’s verse is hardly obscure, though inevitably overshadowed by her one magnum opus Wuthering Heights. Add this to the fact that Victorian poetry is a decidedly mixed bag - for every Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning there are multiple Algernon Charles Swinburnes and Arthur Symonses - and you might feel justified in approaching this evening with a degree of advised trepidation.
Because The Unthanks are uncompromising: their way is not to slip in a few crowd-winning old favourites in-between the forbidding ‘new stuff’ to keep their audiences happy. Every Unthanks tour features the current album and related material, with few backward glances at the back catalogue. In this, they resemble no-one so much as Neil Young, who once notoriously played nothing but his (the new) Tonight’s The Night before it had been released to an audience completely unfamiliar with its songs, before encore-ing with another version of the title track.
At Leeds Town Hall, The Unthanks wrapped up a short pre-Christmas tour with a presentation of the new song cycle and you have to give them credit for thinking big - the Town Hall is a venue better-suited to symphony concerts or rock gigs, not the less extroverted sound of two voices accompanied by a piano. Add in the ‘unfamiliar material’ factor and you’re looking at a distinctly risky proposition - would Bronte’s delicate words and McNally’s intricate melodies get lost in the vast spaces?
They needn’t have worried, the cycle was well-received by a fairly full house, though doubts remained as to whether it wouldn’t have been a better idea to perform it Liederabend style as a continuous piece rather than breaking it up to introduce individual numbers, particularly as some of the songs are set to very brief lyrics. The focus for the most part was on the voices of sisters Becky and Rachel Unthank, with their fresh-air purity and inflection of innocent, sometimes naive menace. Although the Bronte lyrics are somewhat oblique, the blending of the sisters’ voices has its own magic and McNally’s insistent, ostinato accompaniment at the piano gave them all the support they needed.
The mood lightened somewhat with the encores - old favourite The Testimony of Patience Kershaw, lifted verbatim from a statement by an 1840s female mine operative and, to finish, a ‘round’ number called The Tar Barrel which invited audience participation. More can be expected from The Unthanks very soon - but no-one can easily guess what direction they’ll travel in.
Support was from a new duo called You Tell Me, who hail from the same part of the world as The Unthanks but veer more towards folk-pop of the Juliet Lawson variety. They performed a good half hour set and showed lots of potential.
Reviewer - Richard Ely
on - 21/12/18
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