The Unthanks

Whelan’s, Dublin

English folk musicians take their blues in great big glugs of misery, if Jonny Kearney and Lucy Farrell are anything to go by. Supporting The Unthanks, Jonny and Lucy cut a maudlin pair, their repertoire laden with tales of souls sold to pawnbrokers and love lost forever, but Kearney’s songwriting is cut glass to Farrell’s genteel harmonies, and the duo peddled some gorgeously somnolent guitar lines and the sweetest (yet never unctuous) harmonies this side of The Unthanks.

Punctuated by the incessant ker-ching of the cash register, Rachel and Becky Unthank and their (stripped-down) five-piece band drew a capacity crowd. Rachel Unthank and The Winterset bagged a Mercury nomination in 2007 with their sizzling take on English folk: rooted in the grit and grime of northern England with its meandering tales of class, heartbreak, poverty and war, but shaken and stirred by Rachel and Becky’s vividly compelling voices.

Now rebranded as The Unthanks, their wit and easy communication with their audience is a unique selling point, although their fondness for planting their cupped hands around their right ears while harmonising filled this reviewer with dread that this glorious night would morph into a “nyah” fest at any moment.

It didn’t, though. When you’ve a knapsack full of pristine songs, many of them borrowed from contemporary songwriters such as Annie Briggs, Nic Jones and (the not so contemporary) Nick Drake, there’s little time for loitering at folk’s more esoteric edges. Truth is, Becky and Rachel possess voices of incomparable depth, with Rachel’s, in particular, mining seams so rich they’d make the Rockefellers look like tuppence ha’penny.

Singing a cappella, Lucky Gilchristshimmies in the dark night. Anachie Gordonis a parched odyssey, fraught with thwarted love and premature and tragic death. Betsy Bellis a pastoral delight, tootling along on the back of songwriter and arranger Adrian McNally's tinkling piano, but it's The Testimony of Patience Kershawand the title track from their latest collection, Here's the Tender Coming, that renders the cardiac muscle still. Music by, of and for folk, pure and simple.