Lines (Unthanks album)


Lines , a trilogy of albums with a poetic theme by English folk group the Unthanks, was pre-released on the band's website in November 2018, on 10" vinyl, CD and download, prior to their official release on 22 February 2019. They were made available as three separate albums and also packaged together in a slipcase.
Lines Part One: Lillian Bilocca is about the 1968 trawler disaster in Kingston upon Hull in which 58 men died. The songs were written by actor and writer Maxine Peake, with music by Adrian McNally. They were originally performed live by the Unthanks in The Last Testament of Lillian Bilocca, a theatrical event written by Peake.
Lines Part Two: World War One is about the First World War. Its songs were originally conceived for a live audio-visual project in 2014, A Time and a Place. One of the songs, "Roland and Vera", is adapted from letters between the writer Vera Brittain who was a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in the war, and her fiancé Roland Leighton, a poet, who died from a gunshot wound sustained on the war front.
Lines Part Three: Emily Brontë consists of ten poems by Emily Brontë, set to music by Adrian McNally. The songs were commissioned by the Brontë Society to mark the 200th anniversary of her birth.

Reception

The album received a four-starred review in The Guardian from Neil Spencer.
Also writing in The Guardian, Jude Rogers said that "The Unthanks continue to experiment ravenously and joyously".

Track listing

''Part One: Lillian Bilocca''

The albums' cover artwork is by Natalie Rae Reid.