Like your extended family after one too many mince pies, the Christmas album market is bloated and inert. Last year, everyone from Jessie J to William Shatner proffered their takes on the same old seasonal standards. Yet there are few musicians better suited to this cosily camp form than Robbie Williams: the 45-year-old’s career has been almost entirely fuelled by the kind of arch schmaltz that is the genre’s lifeblood.
In some senses, The Christmas Present is the perfect medium for Williams, a chilled-out entertainer with a penchant for old-school crooning. A mix of covers and original material, the record allows him to indulge his passion for swing music: he goes full Rat Pack tribute act on Let It Snow, and inducts some other classics into the easy-listening canon – notably, a Jamie Cullum-abetted take on Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody that nobody needs.
But it’s the bonkers original tracks that make The Christmas Present stand out from the cash-cow crowd. Over jaunty, sub-Beautiful South instrumentals, Williams delivers some of the strangest songs of his career. There is Bad Sharon, a lairy duet with gravel-voiced boxer Tyson Fury; Snowflakes, a dad joke-stuffed portrait of a dysfunctional family; and Happy Birthday Jesus Christ, a love letter to the messiah featuring the immortal couplet: “Healed the lame, forgave the foolish / On your first birthday you were Jewish.” Clearly Williams is playing for laughs, but these aren’t exactly comic masterpieces – let alone future festive anthems.
The Christmas Present may be the perfect outlet for Williams’s wryly mawkish sensibilities, but it is still a gift few people will want to find under the tree.
