The Unthanks
Album: Diversions Vol 3: Songs from the Shipyards
Label: RabbleRouser
Tracks: 11
Website: https://www.the-unthanks.com

The search for the unexpected is invariably a fruitless one - far better to let it find you. And so it was with The Unthanks' Diversions project in which the group step still further outside their already sprawling comfort zone to push their musical reach well beyond its grasp.

The first set retooled the songs of Robert Wyatt and Antony & the Johnsons, giving a striking new context to some truly great material. Completely unexpected, its success was almost a bonus so enthralling was the prospect. The second album took some of the region's most memorable and striking traditional songs and reworked them to a brass band accompaniment courtesy of the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band. Great songs of human triumph and (mostly) tragedy took on bold new dimensions, never more so than Ewan MacColl's achingly frank The Father's Song.

This new set gathers up the highlights of a concert programme created to accompany Tyneside Cinema's film, Songs from the Shipyards, that uses archive film to trace the story of shipbuilding over the last century or so. In doing so it serves as a chronicle of Britain's industrial history, from manufacturing prowess to working museum cultural tourism.

So we get an astonishing selection of songs drawn from the relatively young songbook of the shipbuilding industry. Rachel and Becky Unthank's vocals are sparse, dry and frequently heartbreaking. But then so are the songs - Big Steamers, All In a Day, Taking On Men - these are songs about leaving, going away, hoping for a return, knowing that noting is easy.

At the heart of the album is The Romantic Tees, a suite of music composed by pianist/producer Adrian McNally to accompany launch, a 1973 film of the shipyards. Again, the music tugs the heartstrings, at once uplifting and sorrowful as Graeme Miles' prose paints its own pictures and the sounds of the yards are woven into the piece, as is the voice of George Unthank, Rachel and Becky's dad; while the sisters deliver an impossibly tender vocal on the segued The Tyne Slides By and The Looking Back Song.

Predictably perhaps, but no less tellingly, Elvis Costello's Shipbuilding is tackled superbly with McNally taking a poetic, haunting lead vocal.

Songs from the Shipyards is a suitably bold and beautifully executed addition to The Unthanks' already impressive catalogue.

Nick Churchill
www.thegranvillechambers.co.uk