Leona Lewis – Christmas with Love

As always, the yuletide season, along with the cold, the tinsel and the rich food, brings with it a fresh crop of Christmas albums. They become either festive classics, like Bing Crosby’s  Merry Christmas or Mariah Carey’s 1994 release featuring the same unoriginal title, or they become ear-bleeding endurance tests for your pre-party preparational stress – the ones that add to the fatigue while you wait in the queue at the supermarket or the department store. Leona Lewis’s venture into this grand tradition reaches the half-way point.

Her very beautiful, soulful, satiny voice wafts appealing through the various original songs and seasonal standards like a sweet scented candle; the result is adequately Christmassy, with tracks like One More Sleep, Christmas (Baby Please Come Home), and I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday, which, apart from the vocal elasticity of the singer, are characterised mainly by a typical Motown-style drum beat, and sprinklings of jingle bells. In keeping with the holiday spirit, there is nothing new here, just musical arrangements that were once new and fun but are now tedious. The album ends with a curiously ill-fitting rendition of Schubert’s Ave Maria, which comes across like a nondescript version sung by a forgettable X-Factor contestant (one thought she would have moved on from there), as well as the mandatory Silent Night.

A good track, briskly up-tempo thanks to the above mentioned retro beat, and very much in the vein of the best seasonal radio-fillers of yore, is Mr Right – a toe-tapping, melodic and flirtatious piece that candidates immediately as a perfect soundtrack for a romantic Christmas morning. Leona Lewis’s latest will certainly please her fans, but the rest of us – those who enjoy her singing – will probably hope for one of her non-festive albums to poke holes in our Christmas stockings while listening to old Christmas favourites.

Mark Sempill

Christmas with Love was released on 29^th November 2013. For further information or to order the album visit Leona Lewis’s website here.

Watch the video for One More Sleep here: