Celtic Thunder - Celtic Christmas Eve [White]

Celtic Christmas Eve is Celtic Thunder at what they do best: taking Christmas carols that everyone already knows and performing them with a lump in your throat, now on white vinyl.

The Irish vocal group has built its reputation on scale, big harmonies and even bigger arrangements, and Christmas proves to be the season that most naturally suits them. This 2021 collection leans towards the older, more solemn part of the repertoire rather than chasing bells and novelty, which is the right instinct. There's a reason Christmas Eve is the specific night of the title, that silence before morning, the family gathered, the world briefly quiet. The album aims for precisely this feeling and hits a lot of it.

Carol of the Bells arrives with all the choral machinery in motion, all cascading counterpoint and increasing urgency, while Silent Night is delivered almost too simply, and is all the more impactful for it. In the Bleak Mid-Winter gets the treatment Christina Rossetti's words deserve, quiet and genuinely cold. Christmas 1915 is the exception and the emotional center of the album, telling the story of the war truce when soldiers on both sides stopped shooting long enough to sing, sung here without a trace of sentimentality.

Fifteen titles for the only night of the year when everyone agrees to sing along.