Mount the Air, the eighth album by English folk group the Unthanks, was released on 9 February 2015. It received five-starred reviews in The Daily Telegraph and The Irish Times and four-starred reviews in the Financial Times and The Guardian. It was the winner in the best album category in the 2016 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards.
Singles
The title track was issued as a single on 8 December 2014. "Flutter", another track from the album, was released as a single on 16 February 2015. A third single, "Died For Love", was released on 8 June 2015.
Reception
Mount the Air received a five-starred review in The Daily Telegraph. Reviewer Helen Brown described the album as "a slow, swirling affair that mixes original material with traditional tales. Underpinned by McNally’s cool, fluid piano it’s simultaneously ancient and fresh."
Joe Breen, writing in The Irish Times, also gave the album five stars, describing the Unthanks' Mount The Air as "their most ambitious work" and saying that it "places them in the same league as the likes of The Gloaming and the Punch Brothers".
In a four-starred review for the Financial Times, David Honigmann said: "Once a bleak Northumbrian chamber folk outfit, the Unthanks have reinvented themselves on a symphonic scale, as witness the 10-minute title track, ushered in on harps and with an orchestration that recalls Gil Evans’s work for Miles Davis." Robin Denselow, in a four-starred review for The Guardian, said: "This is a return to the gentle melancholia of Last, and while there are fine vocals from the Unthank sisters, the dominant figure is Rachel’s husband, Adrian McNally, who plays keyboards and percussion, and produced and wrote much of the music... It’s a lush, often exquisite set". Alexis Petridis, also writing in The Guardian, said it was "ambitious and rooted in folk traditions, without being hard work for the listener". Jason Noble, in a five-starred review for Culturefly, was impressed by the "phenomenal display of collaborative musicianship, with 16 members contributing to the record". Duncan Haskell, reviewing the album for Songwriting magazine, described it as "a majestic tour de force of classical beauty". Mike Davies, for Folking.com, hailed it as "a masterpiece". The Hartlepool Mail said it was The Unthanks' "most rewarding record to date".
Teddy Jamieson, writing in the Sunday Herald, said: "The Unthanks return with an album that takes the folk tradition the sisters grew up on and sails it into wilder waters... Folk's storytelling tradition is still very much at the heart of this album. But what thrills here is the sense of scale at play in the music, the unrushed, easeful way the musicians stretch into songs, let them linger without ever overstaying their welcome. That and the earthy humanity of the sisters' voices."
In a four-starred review, Chris White, for MusicOMH, said that Mount the Air "continues The Unthanks’ journey away from the traditional north-east folk of their earlier albums towards a style that's uniquely their own. It's hard to think of another group anywhere who are creating music quite like this; still grounded in the sounds and spirit of their native region yet compositionally on a different planet to the pub back room strums and ceilidh jigs knocked out by most of their contemporaries." Also giving the album four stars, Thomas Ingham, writing for The Skinny, praised "the swelling and soaring arrangements of Adrian McNally, who manages to merge folk with the unease and medieval European gloom of recent records like Last Ex and the infamous In the Aeroplane Over the Sea". Michael Ainscoe, for Louder Than War, described the album as "a textured soundscape of splendour and sensitive intensity".