If it’s Christmas, Kate Rusby will be found singing, either on tour or with a new album of Yuletide songs in Yorkshire’s stoutly upheld carol-singing tradition. This third Christmas album follows the same pattern as While Mortals Sleep and Sweet Bells, featuring carols recast with folk tunes, well-worn standards and overlooked nuggets. Hence Hark the Herald Angels emerges as Little Bilberry amid a warm wash of brass band, Cold Winter is a retrieved Elizabethan piece and Cornish Wassailing evokes Christmas in the south-west. Rusby’s tremulous vocals can’t do much with Winter Wonderland, but it makes for a winning bundle of secular and sacred, and the self-written title track, though candied, could become a fixture on the tree.
