The Grand Gestures
Happy Holidays
(Chute Records)
Scotland has a proud tradition of bleak Christmas records - the Greentrax Bah! Humbug collection usually wins a seasonal hearing at my holly-bedecked Forth Estate - and this year's winning portion of mistletoe and misanthropy comes from Jan Burnett's collective The Grand Gestures, a Yuletide album apparently always intended as the final offering of the trilogy.
There is as much poetry and storytelling as songsmithery amongst the twelve tracks with the former Spare Snare frontman adopting a Jon Hopkins role, adding odd (peculiar) samples to synthesiser and washes of electronica. Northern Irish poet Ross Thompson has three date-specific contributions, ultimately outshone by John Douglas's grim(m) closing tale of a Scotsman festivities in the Big Smoke, Sergeant Claus. Sanjeev Kohli is again part of the company, this time with a rhyming ballad of philanthropic compulsion and Oedipal guilt, I Never Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus.
The best music comes from Andrew Mitchell of Idlewild/The Hazy Janes (The Death Of A New Year), and Hipsway's Graham Skinner, whose characteristically soulful The Birthday Boy has the chorus refrain: "I can't hear the church bells over the ringing of the tills."
Keith Bruce
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