Okay, so it looks like the Bristol date is sold out, which leaves just one chance for you to witness some of the best purveyors of warped time machine folk rock around. The Unthanks have just dropped one of the albums of the year: ‘Last’ is like a bleak documentary about abandoned Yorkshire barns crossed with a David Peace novel crossed with many devastatingly sad folk songs from a hundred years ago. For something so quiet it socks you in the gut like a farming accident. That’s a recommendation by the way. Trembling Bells on the other hand rock like they have spiked sawdust floating in their real ale: channelling ancient folk ghosts too but letting them wail like unquiet murder victims. Their psych-rock-via-possessed-sea-shanties path is always a fine one, even if Alex Neilson is determined to never crack a smile. I dunno, tickle him or something, but go if you at all can.
The Unthanks + Trembling Bells
Arnolfini
Mon 21 Mar, 7.30pm
£15 (standing) / £17 (reserved seating) advance
For all the acclaim for their three albums to date, the Mercury Music Prize nominated Tyneside sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank have become most legendary for their live performances. Empathetic stories of love, loss, birth, death, brawls and booze make for a rollercoaster ride through the human condition, as Rachel and Becky’s folk-club unaccompanied singing upbringing is set against otherworldly musical pictures, arranged by a band with influences from Steve Reich to Miles Davies, Martin Hayes to Robert Wyatt and Portishead to Sufjan Stevens.
The Unthanks will play music from their new album, as well as from their previous records, including The Bairns, which featured in both the The Guardian and Uncut’s Best Albums of the Decade, all genres, worldwide – the only British folk album to do so.
‘Intimate, epic, overflowing with feeling and musical intelligence‘ The Independent
www.the-unthanks.com
www.myspace.com/rachelunthank
www.twitter.com/TheUnthanks
Later with Jools Holland, BBC2
Here’s The Tender Coming
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bRR6DVWEUM
Lucky Gilchrist
www.youtube.com/watch?v=enGRCQxvH-0&feature=related
A Qujunctions production
Roots Unearthed-The Unthanks
This concert will take place in the Auditorium
THE UNTHANKS
Support-Trembling Bells
The Unthanks are back with a new album, the follow-up to Here’s The Tender Coming, which featured in The Guardian and Uncut’s Best Albums of the Year and was awarded Mojo Magazine Folk Album of the Year. For all the acclaim for their 3 albums to date, the Mercury Music Prize nominated Tyneside sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank have become most legendary for their live performances. Empathetic stories of love, loss, birth, death, brawls and booze make for a rollercoaster ride through the human condition, as Rachel and Becky’s folk-club unaccompanied singing upbringing is set against otherworldly musical pictures, arranged by a band with influences from Steve Reich to Miles Davies, Martin Hayes to Robert Wyatt, Portishead to Sufjan Stevens. It’s hard to conceive how music could sound so traditional and adventurous at once. It is a spell that has earned them fans as disperate as members of Radiohead and Portishead, Nick Hornby, Elvis Costello, Robert Wyatt, Ewan McGregor, Ryan Adams, Paul Morley, Ben Folds, Rosanne Cash and Dawn French! by Britain’s leading music journalist Paul Morley as both “supernaturally ancient and defiantly modern, as coldly desolate as achingly intimate”, The Unthanks occupy unique ground. The Unthanks will play music from their new album, as well as from their previous records, including The Bairns, which featured in both the The Guardian and Uncut’s Best Albums of the Decade, all genres, worldwide – the only British folk album to do so.
“once in a blue moon type of every now and again, you hear music that is so complete, so wonderful, unique and yet familiar that it stops you in your tracks. They have that blue moon magic about them, and they have it in spades” BBC Music
Follow this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bRR6DVWEUM to see The Unthanks perform ‘Here’s The Tender Coming’ on Later with Jools Holland.
The Unthanks special guests on this tour are Trembling Bells, Alex Neilson’s song-based group who, through their blending of early music, folk, country and rock influences seek to reanimate the psychic landscapes of Great Britain and relocate them to some vague, mythic land where basic human crises are encountered and conquered.
