Track Listing

1. Felton Lonnin
2. Lull I
3. Blue Bleezing Blind Drunk
4. I Wish
5. Blue's Gaen Oot O'the Fashion
6. Lull II (My Lad's A Canny Lad)
7. Blackbird
8. Lull III (A Minor Place)
9. Sea Song
10. Whitethorn
11. Lull IV (Can't Stop It Raining)
12. My Donald
13. Ma Bonny Lad
14. Fareweel Regality
15. Newcastle Lullaby

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #248 in Music
• Released on: 2007-08-20
• Number of discs: 1

CD Description
Second album, following 2005's 'Cruel Sister', from cult Northumbrian all-female folk quartet, which found itself in many critics' lists as one of the best albums of 2007 and is nominated for the 2008 Mercury Prize. Bewitching, haunting and melancholy, the album absorbs and transcends the folk idiom, its mostly beatless songs buoyed and given an almost classical beauty by the plangent strings of the Northern Sinfonia.

Customer Reviews

..... above and beyond.......
To tell the truth there is very little I can add that hasn't already been said by those reviewers more knowledgeable and eloquent. Most here obviously feel the same way I do about this music Still there is something about "The Bairns" that creates a need to share my delight.

I discovered this album as part of my annual buying of the "Mercury Prize shortlist". Suffice to say all of the others have already faded away into the background and pall in comparison to this exquisite piece of work.

I remember the Guardian blabbing on about The Winterset when this was released but did the shameful "folk: I don't really do folk" thing and ignored it. My embarrassment at that earlier narrowness of vision is luckily smothered by my sheer joy of finally discovering what I was missing.

Let me start by saying that I have never heard anything like this before. This is something above and beyond the term "music". It's an experience that honestly transcends everything I have heard and loved in the past. As you immerse yourself in this album moments of devastating, desperate beauty emerge, entangling and drawing you further into the overriding hypnotic framework and gently rhythmic flow that flawlessly holds this exceptional work together.
This is a collection of tunes that will move you deeply, sometimes to tears, sometimes to laughter. I recently saw them live (which mere words cannot recommend strongly enough but it is, incredibly, even better live) and was somewhat relieved and amused to see other people nearby wiping away discreetly shed tears.
It was "Blackbird" and "Sea song" that initially hooked me but it was "Felton Lonnin", "Blue's Gaen Oot O'the Fashion" and especially "I Wish" that reeled me in. Now I'm hopelessly and wonderfully under the spell of this towering achievement.
Do they actually know how good this album is? Are they aware what they've created? Can they possibly produce something this perfect again? I certainly hope so because I just can't stop listening to this. Months later and all other music is still strangely irrelevant.

I know little about music but I think it's safe to say what's so very special about "The Bairns" is the overall structure and the arrangements. All the elements that make up each track work so perfectly together and something that initially seems relatively simplistic reveals layer upon layer of depth both audible and emotional.
Like an earlier reviewer I'm usually reaching for the hankies before "Fareweel Regality" has finished and I'm at a total loss to explain why.

My eyes have been opened to folk
I am not a folk officianado or a big fan of the genre. Nevertheless, a friend persuaded me to purchase this album as he proclaimed that the strength of the performances, songs etc crossed all boundaries. High praise... and, for once, not ill-founded.
In fact, I have become so attached to this CD that I may be forced to rethink my albums of the year. And yes, this could well be my number one for 2007.
The simple fact of the matter is that 'The Bairns' has a truly timeless quality. It is wonderfully arranged and the piano playing and vocal harmonies, in particular, incredibly creative.
Undoubtedly one of the most haunting, yet uplifting, CDs in my pretty extensive collection. Far better than Polly Harvey's new record, which actually treads a not too dissimilar path.
All in all, anyone who loves passionate female performers - from Kate Bush, Joanne Newsom etc to Bats For Lashes - will love this album.
I'm not ready to purchase a wooly jumper or grow a beard yet, and thankfully this traditional, but very fresh sounding, album doesn't make me feel alienated for not being of that ilk.
The northumbrian lasses have done good.

blue, bleezing, brilliant
'A bit of melancholy is not always a bad thing,' writes Rachel Unthank in the liner notes to The Bairns, the new album from this ambitious and fascinating Northumbria/Tyneside quartet. It's a sentiment followed consistently through this, their latest collection of traditional songs, covers, and self-penned compositions.

Dealing with everything from lost love, desertion, infant mortality, domestic abuse, vanishing innocence and the sorrow suffered by those who stand and wait, this is a dark and very tough series of songs. But it is also bitingly beautiful, and filled with the sort of delicate glory that reminds you of walking through a dense, creaking forest in winter, only to occasionally see the sun glinting here and there through the branches.

The soundscape is, on first listening, bleak and unflinching; piano notes are picked out with crystalline precision, dying as soon as they're struck; strings scratch and moan; the voices loom and fade with each telling phrase, but gradually, as you listen again and again, a picture grows around each song. Colour fills in. The centre holds, and the songs sketch themselves indelibly. Peppered throughout the album are verses lifted from the traditional Minstrelsy, played, mostly, straight and with the honesty that such well-surviving music demands, but it is surrounded by veerings off into something wholly different and, yes, dammit, unique. Here and there are totally unexpected harmonies, blasts of pop piano and John Barry strings, great washes of layered vocals, birdsong and deep-sea laments. It is an avalanche of unexpected sound, a truly mesmerising mix, rooted in the traditional, but leading it off hither and thither into the dark.

And, oh my, what darkness.

Rachel and her sister, Becky, launch themselves fearlessly into these songs. Singing with an eyes-wide-open soulfulness, they tackle the harshest parts of ordinary lives, in an extraordinary way. As you might expect, even if you're not a fan of traditional music, their voices are flawless and pure. Not of the shatter-if-you-gave-it-a-hard-stare quality that some of the more elfin, floaty dress and pixie singers might exhibit, but flawless nevertheless. These girls like to mix it up.

Never is this more in evidence than on the stunning Blue Bleezing Blind Drunk, an exhausting, tingles-down-the-spine description of abuse. Becky, with a breathy, bluesy, keening paints a gruesome image:

"Dear friends I have a sad story,
A very sad story to tell.
I married a man for his money,
And he's worse than the Devil himself."

There's vulnerability, defiance and the maddening circularity of abuse fitted into one brief, gorgeous, horrifying plea. On the turning of a piano phrase (Belinda O'Hooley's keyboard features on almost every song, flitting from classical to rock, from the Music Hall to Gershwin, and is a huge joy), Rachel takes over and stands up to the bully, the beat thundering along, harmonies crackling and bouncing all over the place, but you know where it'll end as the tempo drops and the blues come back right at the death.

Another huge highlight is Belinda's self-penned pop song, the poetic lilting, Blackbird, which explores why we sing and why we enjoy music so much. Across a gorgeous melody, and the expected beautiful vocals, the fourth member of the group, Niopha Keegan, weaves a spell-binding thread from her fiddle, like the best dawn chorus you ever heard.

Bu the central song, for me is Sea Song, a cover of the great Robert Wyatt tune. Becky, again, a young Northern lass with a voice that could stop you in your tracks, breathes dark shadowy life into this startling, elegiac anthem to the complexity of human relationships:

"Am I yours? Are you mine to play with?
But joking apart, when you're drunk you're terrific,
When you're drunk I like you mostly late at night.
You're quite alright.
But I can't understand the different you in the morning."

When she hits you with that classic line:

"Your madness fits in nicely with my own, with my own
Your lunacy fits neatly with my own"

she's got you, you're taken in. This is wonderful, beautiful stuff, music that'll keep you company in your deepest reflective moments. I can't recommend it enough. Plus, it's now overtaken Billy Bragg's Tank Park Salute, in having a track that I can't get through without blubbing, the valedictory Fareweel Regality. I'm trying it now, and I'm choked. Brilliant, just brilliant. Never mind wherever call the Fates, The Bairns is, thus far, my album of 2007.