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Album Review

She & Him
A Very She & Him Christmas Domino

Article written by James S - Dec 15, 2011

She & Him - A Very She & Him Christmas

Now I can’t say that I’ve tried myself, but it must be bloody difficult to come up with new Christmas songs when there are already so many timeless tunes around. Damn you Frank, Phil, Bing et al – you’ve ruined it for everyone else

Well, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, and that’s exactly what Zooey Deschanel and M Ward, aka She and Him, have done. The dozen tracks on ‘A Very She & Him Christmas' fall firmly into the ‘American holiday classics’ category, with not one written in the past forty years.

Still, taking on the old-timers’ tunes brings with it the pressure not to fuck them up of course. Possibly conscious of this concern, this is a remarkably low-key collection, which strips away much of the lush orchestration of their previous work to leave little more than Ward’s gentle guitar and Deschanel’s warm, rich voice.

And by and large it certainly works. Relatively unfamiliar songs on this side of the Atlantic, such as Christmas Day and The Christmas Waltz, sit happily alongside instantly hummable hits like Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas and The Christmas Song. A particularly lovely run through Sleigh Ride reintroduces the original’s additional bridge lyrics which had been largely consigned to history since Phil Spector reinvented it almost fifty years ago.

Elsewhere, there’s a gorgeous, stripped back version of Silver Bells, which not only adds to but actually tops the original for my money, and a charming rendition of Rocking Around The Christmas Tree, even if it can’t fail to remind listeners of a certain age of the Kim Wilde and Mel Smith version.

If there is a duff note, then it’s that Baby It’s Cold Outside is played way too fast, losing all the nuance between the conflicting vocals, which unconventionally see Deschanel play the ‘wolf’ and Ward the ‘mouse’. And it’s not as good as the version she sings in the shower in Elf of course.

So, all in all, not quite a Christmas cracker but it sure aint no turkey either. A bit more bravery to write their own material and some festive jolliness wouldn’t go amiss if there’s a next time though.

Links:
http://http://www.sheandhim.com/
http://www.myspace.com/sheandhim