Emmy The Great & Tim Wheeler - This Is Christmas

Saccharine (adj.)

1. Excessively sweet or sentimental
2. Relating to or containing sugar; sugary

To save me constantly referencing a thesaurus, looking for ten different ways to say the exact same thing, I’ve put that definition at the top of this review. I can call the songs cloying, sickly, overly sentimental but it all comes back to that one word: saccharine. If you were expecting this to sound like Ash, or Emmy’s own output, or a brilliant mixture of the two, you will be sorely disappointed. “This Is Christmas” does what it says on the tin. This is, very much, a traditional Christmas album.

From the get go Emmy The Great & Tim Wheeler signal their intentions, opening the record with a cover of Marshmallow World, a song perhaps best known in it’s Darlene Love incarnation from Phil Spector’s “A Christmas Gift for You”. It’s a song which is LITERALLY saccharine, talking about “a yum-yummy world made for sweethearts” and generally invoking a feeling of nausea. It’s a warning shot from the duo, but you know what; it’s fun! Coated in a pop sheen with strings and horns, it’s a great take on a 60s pop sound which is repeated (and bettered) with the doo-wop girl group stylings of Christmas Moon and (Don’t Call Me) Mrs Christmas. Snowflakes is similarly impressive, managing to sound like every soppy Christmas duet ever. Sure, it’s all pretty lightweight stuff, but it’s enjoyable enough.

Unfortunately midway through the album it all get’s a bit too much, and by the time Home For The Holidays comes around your patience will be starting to wear thin. When the frankly awful Zombie Christmas follows it, you start to question what made Emmy and Tim think they could stretch this out to an entire album. Their decision to create all these sentimental, 60s inspired Christmas songs is bemusing; who is it for? Most Ash or Emmy fans listening to this would, I wager, be asking themselves the same question by the time Jesus The Reindeer comes around.

It’s a shame, as there’s definitely a decent EP in here. But it’s telling that the record’s best songs are those which sound the most like the duo’s day-jobs. Christmas Day (I Wish I Was Surfing) sounds exactly like Ash, to the extent that Emmy’s backing vocals even sound like Charlotte Hatherly, and it’s the clear album highlight. Likewise the folky See You Next Year could be an Emmy The Great solo track, and at least manages to end the record on a relative high.

The concept of recording an old fashioned Christmas pop album is an interesting one, but Emmy and Tim’s failure to stick within those confines only demonstrates the far more interesting record that could have been made. As it is, this is a perfectly competent collection of polished pop songs which it’s hard to get too angry about. If you popped it on your stereo during Christmas dinner, your relatives wouldn’t complain. It’s inoffensive without being idiotic: but it’s also pretty hard to get too excited about. So next year, let’s have a bit more of the below, ok?

6/10