Album: Crash Test Dummies

Jingle All The Way..., Cha-Ching

Decent Christmas albums are amongst the rarest of pop's quirks and oddities – and frankly, given the tone of droll religious scepticism that distinguished their debut album God Shuffled His Feet, one wouldn't have expected the Crash Test Dummies to be the group adding to that slim corpus of seasonal excellence. It's now eight years since the Canadian band scored their lone hit with "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm", and for the first few moments here, as Brad Roberts's lugubrious baritone opens "White Christmas" with a description of orange and palm trees swaying in the Beverly Hills breeze, it seems as if the whole affair might collapse under the weight of irony. But then: "But it's December 24th/ And I'm longing to be up north," and the band launch into a latino-loungecore version of the standard that captures just the right air of frivolous excitement, rescuing the song from the twin grasps of Bing Crosby and Phil Spector. From there on, Jingle All The Way... proceeds with style and imagination, recasting "O Little Town of Bethlehem", "The First Noel" and "Silent Night" as desolate country ballads dripping pedal steel guitar, "In the Bleak Midwinter" and "Good King Wenceslas" as traditional English folk ballads complete with tootling period horns, "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" as cool jazz swing, and "Jingle Bells" as Russian sea-shanty. Most perversely of all, the angular trilling of Japanese koto lends the courtly tone of a Kurosawa historical pageant to the slow processional of "We Three Kings" – though, crucially, in none of these imaginative renditions does the gentle whimsy usurp one's enjoyment for more than a moment.