This album truly is a delightful surprise. Winter Songs Vol. 2 is simply more fun, it swings harder and is filled with far more freshness than I could ever have expected. There will always be people keen to tell you that Nat King Cole and Rosemary Clooney said all that needed to be said about the American Songbook Christmas standards several decades ago. But they’re wrong.
Well, this is a surprise. Not so much that the Sunderland band should do a Christmas album, mind. Despite their raw and spiky hardcore framework, which channelled heavyweights like Gang Of Four and Fugazi, they were always capable of being gentle, dreamlike, flirting with but never tipping over into the whimsical, as on their huge breakthrough cover of Kate Bush’s “Hounds of Love”.
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