Sorrows away

"Northumberland's premier folk adventurers return in style: Sorrows Away often feels like a liberation. Back on the road since the spring, The Unthanks have already been previewing the album live, as an extended 11-piece band, their set hitting peak catharsis with the [title track], inviting everyone into its gently arcing chorus. For those of us who've been lucky enough to be there, it's a deceptively moving moment. The song also contains most everything that makes The Unthanks what they are: impossibly luminous harmonies, a great arrangement, sinuous ensemble work and a symphonic sense of scale".

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"The Unthanks don't falter on what is their first "proper" album in seven years, though the nine minutes of the Sandgate Dandling Song, a Victorian ballad about domestic violence, inclines to the ponderous. They are better when airborne, as on The Old News or Royal Blackbird, a Jacobite song given a lively violin arrangement. The much sung Waters of Tyne is an obvious standout, as is the title track, which has become an anthem on the group's ongoing tour".

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"Folk revivalists make a bewitching return: 'Sorrows Away" is a landmark album by an extraordinary band, full of brutal truths, hope, and moments of musical transcendence that will resonate for generations to come".

"The Unthanks have been closing their concerts with the title-track of their new album and finding that audiences are singing it back to them ... This incarnation of The Unthanks, a ten-piece ensemble, provides ample resources for producer Adrian McNally's ambitious arrangements - bass and brass adornments on 'The Isabella Coke Ovens'; a church organ sound on 'My Singing Bird', countered by Lizzie Jones's exuberant trumpet; trumpet again on 'The Royal Blackbird', and insistent drums ... Sorrows Away is a work of great musical variety. At its centre is the limpid singing of sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank. This remains the constant that's a characteristic of their music and yet I can't help wishing that they sounded less detached, interacting more with the music being made around them".

"Exquisitely arranged for full band, piano, brass, strings, pipe organ and more, "Sorrows Away" contrasts nicely with 2020's all a cappella LP 'Live And Unaccompanied", its title track a hopeful incantation, and "The Old News" demonstrating a Sufjan Stevens-like flair for luminous chamber-pop. There's often an old-world gravitas and a contemporary lightness of touch at play simultaneously, the tangible lineage of these story-rich, often long-form songs reaching deep within you".