Ok you may have heard it or at least the single, Deck The Halls, which got its own music video where an elderly woman is able, with the magic of Disney licensing agreements and 2000’s CGI, to recreate a Christmas from her childhood. But I worry that if you’ve only heard this track you may have skipped the rest of the album.

Deck The Halls doesn’t tread a lot of new ground aside from the vocal harmonies that are the bread and butter of the group’s music. It’s the original tracks that receive the majority of my affection. “Tinsel Town” is the first of these but it would be a mistake to skip straight to it – the 22 second track, “Intro to Tinsel Town”, is a bizarre and wholly uncharacteristic bit of horror tossed into the album where a seemingly demonic being impersonates a young girl’s mother on Christmas morning. It ends with her shrill scream of terror before cutting out and dropping you straight into a quirky quasi-robotic number where the lyrics are concerned with a seemingly endless list of minor annoyances that crop up around Christmas.

So where’s the batteries, it’s Christmas eve

Assembly is required

Can’t get the kids to sleep,

Sugar’s got ’em wired

Another original track is “Twist of the Magi” and features Rascal Flatts. In the original short story each half of a couple sells their most beloved belongings in order to afford a gift for the other that is useless because the thing it is for was what each of them sold. However the twist in the song is that each of them gets rid of a prized possession of the other often in order to buy a gift for themselves but because of that each verse escalates as each one attempts to take revenge for the original theft.

I sank your bass boat (Not my bass boat, no, no, no)
So you’d have more time to spend with me
I hocked your grandma’s diamond earrings
For the down payment on my SUV

In my opinion you haven’t really celebrated Christmas until you’ve heard a choir belting “Not his bass boat, no, not his bass boat!”

The album also has songs that don’t get a lot of playtime like “Christmas Children” and “The Secret of Christmas” – the former is from the musical Scrooge and the latter being a song that was even recorded by Bing Crosby but which has fallen out of the limelight over the decades.

All in all it’s a great addition to your usual rotation or even as a reprieve for the stuff you’ll hear at the mall and the grocery store and on the radio and, well, you get the picture. It’s on Spotify and YouTube Music