Son Of Evil Reindeer

When Gary Lightbody first came up with the idea of getting a load of his musical mates around to record a batch of songs that didn’t exactly fit into the Snow Patrol canon, little did he or anybody else realise just how truly mesmerisingly beautiful the results would turn out to be. The first collection of Lightbody cast-offs, last year’s Y’All Get Scared Now Ya Hear!, may have hinted at the magic within, but that was a mere monochrome sketch compared to the glorious three dimensional technicolour of its new sibling.

Lightbody has again drafted in the proverbial cast of thousands to add their swathes of colour to his compositions, including various members of Astrid, Eva, Mogwai, The Vaselines, Belle & Sebastian, Idlewide, Arab Strab, Alfie and of course his fellow day-jobbers from Snow Patrol. Strangely enough, for an album with more musicians than your average double-CD compilation, the result sounds as cohesive as a Brazilian passing movement and is just as delightful to behold.

There’s the tear-welling tenderness of ‘Budapest’; the lazy doo-wop of ‘Strike Me Down’ (courtesy of Eva’s Jenny Reeve); the sparse guitar and vocals of ‘Where I Fall’; the gorgeously insistent chug-a-lug of ‘Cartwheels’; the so-real-you-can-taste-it apprehension of ‘Cold Water’; the heart-breaking resignation of Roddy Woomble’s vocal on ‘Who Told You?’.

‘Your Sweet Voice’ is achingly lovely, but then so are most of the dozen gems here. The opening ‘Grand Parade’, for example, is so beguilingly gentle and bewitchingly beautiful that even your mother will love it – mine did. Special mention must go to the soaring sugar rush that is current single, ‘You Are My Joy’, a song so utterly in love with life and love itself that it would be churlishly impossible not to fall in love with it.

This is music to cherish, to hold dear, to grasp onto, to grow old with, and to get drunk to. Not merely recommended, this should be prescribed.