Gig review: The Unthanks

Published on Tuesday 27 October 2009 17:57

THE UNTHANKS **** VOODOO ROOMS, EDINBURGH

"WE'RE recording for Jools Holland's show down in London tomorrow," says Rachel Unthank matter-of-factly, as if her audience won't recognise this is a watershed moment in any band's career. The next song, Because He Was A Bonny Lad, is one of those the Unthanks will be recording for Holland and it's also the track on which Rachel corpses, cracking up at some private joke or other when she meets her sister and co-vocalist Becky's eye.

There's an easy-going gang mentality here of the kind many rock groups are too self-important to muster, but there's also a depth to the Unthanks' music which seems wholly unexpected in a band so young. That isn't intended to patronise: the Unthanks, their voices high and girly and heavily accented towards the north-east of England, are transformed when they sing. Rachel, 29, has a ghostly, siren-like folk call, and Becky, only 22, is arguably even more capable.

Backed by eight musicians, five of them women, there's a sense that the Unthanks are almost a folk orchestra. The music is as precise and well-composed as the vocal parts on tracks from the new album, Here's the Tender Coming, but the depth of history here also resonates. Lancashire street song Wher've Yer Bin Dick is alive with colourful dialect, while Guard Your Man Well and The Testimony of Patience Kershaw deal with the north's lost mining culture from two very different points of view.