THE UNTHANKS Last (2011 UK 11-track CD album - The Mercury nominated 2007 album 'The Bairns' was the only British folk album both in the The Guardian and Uncut's best albums of the decade. If there is only one this next decade, it could be 'Last'. Without doubt the most confident and important Unthanks album to date. 'Last' was made predominantly at the snowed-under Northumberland farmhouse that is home of Rachel and Adrian. Having made the highly successful 'Here's The Tender Coming'in a studio, the return to home recording might have signaled a move back to the intimacy of their earlier work, but in practice, 'Last' takes on the epic hallmarks of a masterpiece, in terms of the scale and atmosphere of the setting. It is a sound and scale that like 'Felton Lonin' from 'The Bairns', evokes the atmosphere of the landscape of Tyneside and Northumberland; the relationship anomaly between the bleak starkness and beauty of it's open spaces, between the peaceful landscape that is given an eerie quality by it's bloody and then industrial past)