As a self-confessed Christmas lover, I like to buy myself a new Christmas album every year.
This year, it was the turn of Aiden Moffat and RM Hubbert and who followed up the exceptional Here Lies the Body with their triumphant Ghost Stories for Christmas. You won’t hear on this any of the saccharin sweet songs that could only be listened to at one time of year and you tire of after a few listens. This may be a Christmas album, and yes, the songs may have a theme of Christmas to them, but I know I will listen to this all year round. The end of Weihnachtsstimmung says it all. So much weight is put on people that Christmas is the most important day of the year and everyone should be joyful, that the pressure and stress of spending money and being happy takes over– “but we can be kind all year, so lets at least try”
This album tugs at every emotion. There are moments of pure joy and parts that will have the tears welling up and a lump rising in the throat.
Magnificent
The opening instrumental Fireside sets the tone for the album with underlying crackling fire sounds overlaid with RM Hubbert’s aching beautiful guitar leading into the magnificence of A Ghost Story for Christmas with a guest appearance from the radiant Emma Pollock.
Basing itself in the real world, there is an expected gritty realism to much of the lyrical content and a sense of melancholy underlying, a case in point being Ode to Plastic Mistletoe, enough to make you avoid heading out to the pub over Christmas and New Year.
Elsewhere Moffat and Hubbert update a Hans Christian Andersen tale on The Fir Tree – a warning about being careful what you wish for. They also reinterpret the words of Dickens (The Recurrence of Dickens), highlighting the adversity faced by many at Christmas, but advocating the counting of your blessings and not dwelling on the doom and gloom – but with an underlying feeling that no matter how far society may have appeared to have come since Dickensian times, we still face the same problems and fears.
Such Shall You Be is one of those tear-inducing songs about the passing of time, aging and family. It may seem at first like a sad song, but the last line brings a beaming smile to the face and a warm glow about what Christmas really means.
Lonely This Christmas
The treatment that is given to Lonely This Christmas gives the song a whole new lease of life. Plaintive bells jangle in the background while the 1950s sounding guitar parts mean the song takes on an underlying Lynchian feel. Fantastic.
This isn’t the only cover on the album, the pair also take on the, previously covered at Christmas by the Flying Pickets, Yazoo classic Only You. This also surpasses all expectations with Jenny Reeve providing a perfect foil to Aiden’s forlorn vocal.
The album comes to a close with Moffat’s kids singing at the end of aforementioned The Recurrence of Dickens leaving a smile on the face with the confirmation that Christmas isn’t about who can spend the most money, provide the most extravagant feast or have the biggest tree, it is all about the joy that family and loved ones bring with the most simple of things.
Remember – we CAN be kind all year, so lets at least try.