The Unthanks In Winter

The Unthanks are playing EPIC Studios on Monday 14 December, bringing their winter-themed album In Winter to the stage. It's a concept record that runs for 75 minutes, built around Christmas tunes from a few different cultures, mixing traditional carols with newly written songs and filtering the lot through the band's own idiosyncratic style. They describe it as a winter fantasia.

There's a fair bit of ground covered in the set. One German Christmas song is reimagined in the style of The Beach Boys; a Spanish carol is run through a Tom Waits filter; a French carol is given a desert-blues menace. Alongside those, there's a newly written tribute to the NHS set to the tune of O Holy Night. The whole thing is meant to be heard as a single piece, rather than a collection of separate songs.

It's a record that's drawn comparisons to The Watersons' 1965 classic Frost and Fire, and the reviews have been pretty consistent in how they talk about it. TradFolk called it 'the definitive folk album for winter', Songlines described it as 'an artful triumph', Klof called it 'a massive statement', Fatea 'the essence of winter in all its emotional complexity', and The Wire 'the familiar made strange'.

The gig is at EPIC Studios, 112-114 Magdalen St, NR3 1JD. Doors open at 19:00 and the music starts at 20:00, with a curfew of 23:00. Under-16s need to be accompanied by an adult.