Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The Unthanks’ latest album is set in winter — as if the group were really ever anywhere else. From their chamber-folk beginnings through to later incarnations somewhere between a big band and a small orchestra, the combination of Rachel and Becky Unthank’s shivering voices and icy piano — first from Belinda O’Hooley and later from Stef Conner and Adrian McNally — has always had a decidedly cool tinge.In Winter can be compared to Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, a sound portrait of a summer’s day as a set of leisurely tone poems. The new album has a similar sense of slipping between reality and memory: feet crunch on gravel; bells toll far off; snatches of conversation can be overheard from neighbouring rooms; familiar melodies stick on a single line, repeat, are made strange. At the heart of this winter is a cultural rather than a religious Christmas. The best-known carols (“O Come All Ye Faithful”, “In the Bleak Midwinter”, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”) are fragments stripped of their triumph, if not quite their joy. Their medieval forebears, like “The Cherry Tree Carol”, its Joseph a jealous, untrusting husband, have their full weirdness honoured. There are folk songs proper: Rachel sings “The Snow It Melts the Soonest” to a bleak, lovely instrumental backing, drifting and dropping away underneath her. The “Gower Wassail” is set to shimmering guitar and vibraphone, with the sisters’ voices breathing close. Newer songs build on the frosty atmosphere, never more so than on Graeme Miles’s “Dark December”, where the line “should we curse the winter” is repeated like an incantation. “Nurse Emmanuel” pays tribute to the NHS during the pandemic. “Tar Barrel In Dale”, a fiery New Year song by the sisters’ father and an old live favourite, gets its first proper recording. Becky’s closing “Dear Companions” moves seamlessly from the specific and familial to the universal.★★★★☆‘In Winter’ is released by Rabble Rouser
