Here's The Tender Coming

The Unthank sisters’ third album brings a darker tinge to traditional folk songs. After the first two albums’ quartet lineup with few additional instruments (under the name Rachel Unthank And The Winterset), Here’s the Tender Coming launched the new format of The Unthanks. This involved, after the departure of Belinda O’Hooley for a solo and duo career, the addition of string quartet, brass and a lot more overdubs. The liner notes to this album refer to it as a move to a gentler emotional territory than the very dark The Bairns, but it is nevertheless an atmospheric, melancholy album full of extended rhapsodic versions of songs about lost love, isolation and unhappiness. All of which does not mean it is a miseryfest, or that its immediate reception as the best work yet by some of the most original musicians in Britain today was undeserved.