They nearly won the Mercury a few years ago. Not if we were judging, perhaps.

[Video][Website]
[5.00]

Anthony Easton: The website claims that they are inspired by Steve Reich–as much as I would like to see Steve Reich work through instrumental versions of Childe Ballads, this seems to be one of those UK tours through history, sort of like a Geordie Alasdair Roberts. But I love Roberts, I love how he refuses to hide his accents, and i am all for the simultaneous pull of sex and death, so I like this, as is expected.
[8]

Michaela Drapes: I’m all for the reinterpretation of folk songs; but the saccharine, plodding and predictable tweeification of this bitter, heartbreaking traditional (I’m most familiar with Joan Baez’s restrained and bitter interpretation) is downright awful. Is this what’s passing for quality these days — uninspired vocals backed by equally unimaginative arrangements (that glockenspiel, seriously!)? Certainly the English folk tradition deserves better. I’ll take Eliza Carthy instead, thanks.
[0]

Doug Robertson: Everyone loved Broadcast. And if you didn’t then you are a cold, cold, person. Which is perhaps appropriate given that their music could lack warmth, but if you ever wondered what Broadcast would sound like with a fire burning in their bellies and with the glitches replaced with britches, then this is for you. Folk can be a dirty word, with good reason, but when it sounds this inventive and this embracing you’re reminded that even the dirtiest of words exist for a very good reason.
[8]

Mallory O’Donnell: There are so many things that the UK has taken from America, and so many things that we have taken from y’all. Here are three things we never want you to give us back again: country death songs; family acts; playing card metaphors. Thank you.
[3]

Katherine St Asaph: I’d be lying if I said that this didn’t move me, or that the child-voice (or perhaps Child-voice) with its flat-affect harmonies didn’t make me muse upon whirling through a forest someplace with stones stitched into the seams of my too-gossamer dress. That would end in death, of course, and I’ve got buildings and bandwidth and stable thoughts to intervene besides. But I would have prostrated before this when I was a 14-year-old Sarah Brightman worshipper, and since I indulge my tweenage musical tastes daily, why not this too?
[8]

Alfred Soto: This is not Juice Newton.
[4]

Pete Baran: As a primer on “how to enunciate like proper folk musicians” this cannot be beaten. I am always surprised how much folk music eschews the dolorous effect of colliery brass, as they are a terrific fit. That said, for all the sonic beauty on display here, the song comes across as a bit of a nothing.
[5]

Edward Okulicz: The arrangement here is so strange on the ears, and even if the song comes from the same basic tradition as the singers, it sounds ill-fitting, like something’s been added that doesn’t go with the other elements, and I don’t mean the glockenspiel. It stumbles around creepy, fey, wispy and all manner of other moods without really closing the deal. Finally, it kind of falls over brass with its elongated vowels and unsettlingly child-like enunciation.
[4]

Jer Fairall: A musical niche I enjoy but rarely find myself exposed to all that much, I’m primed to really like this, and the ominous music box ring that opens the song suggests that I will. But for a songwriting tradition that places such an emphasis on storytelling, this particular tale doesn’t really go anywhere interesting, and the vocalist, while nicely frayed around the edges, lacks the commanding force of someone like Laura Marling, whom I find impossible not to think of when hearing this, and really wish I had cause to listen to right now instead.
[5]