The wildly successful crooner repackages last year’s silken festive offering with four more tracks. But is it an improvement?
Bubl� has grafted some new appendages to last year’s festive outing, redoubling his efforts of seduction.
As well as being – hold your breath now – ‘packaged in a hot silver foil presentation’ which to you and me means the writing’s silver not red, we also get four more tracks on this 2012 revisit, and – dab my brow – a five-second Christmas greeting from the man himself.
Of the new material, the elegant and refined Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire) gets a bit yawnsome, while Winter Wonderland’s peaceful entrance gives way to the brassy big guns for a Broadway finish in line with other tunes here.
The Puppini Sisters feature in a second tune alongside the cantering, jazzy Jingle Bells; this year Frosty The Snowman gets the slick and speedy toe-tapper treatment, the sisters under-used as candied backing singers.
Silver Bells’ slow and sober sign-off, with Naturally 7, struggles to leave its mark too.
More quantity, yes – but the new songs really don’t add quality.
3 stars
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