Release Date 15th September
"In essence it’s about a raw authenticity, coupled with intensely impressive musical values, taste, imagination, an appetite for risk-taking, and at the centre of it, two utterly ravishing voices. The world is richer with them in it, and The Bairns remains a towering achievement.' Excerpt from new foreword by conductor Charles Hazlewood. Originally released and licensed to EMI in 2007, The Bairns is now reissued on RabbleRouser Music. Nominated for the 2008 Mercury Music Prize, and the only British folk album to appear in The Guardian and Uncut's 100 Albums of the Decade.
'The Bairns is a bewitching, dream-like, down-to-earth masterpiece… music as tough as it is gentle, as ancient as it is modern, and as coldly desolate as it is achingly intimate.. a joyous, virtuous and luscious un-folk album – ancient melodies, graphic atmospheres and everyday concerns radically transformed by bloody-minded and discriminating modern sensibilities. If you only buy one folk album this year… Rachel Unthank and The Winterset's eerie, heart-rending eerie, heart-rending masterpiece The Bairns' - Paul Morley, Observer Music Magazine (Top 50 Albums of the Year, Number 17, 2008).