Kylie Christmas Kylie Minogue Parlophone Two-and-a-half stars
The formula for festive albums is fairly straightforward: re-record a few seasonal classics, add a sprinkling of songs closely associated with frosty December mornings, garnish with something new and hope that when the snow settles, one of your songs emerges as a track for the years.
Kylie Christmas stays true to that prescription, opening with a theatrical, but flat, arrangement of It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year and a rather lacklustre Santa Claus is Coming to Town, which is a peculiar and unsatisfactory duet with the late Frank Sinatra.
Another collaboration, Kylie's take on Christmas Wrapping, The Waitresses' festive floor filler, features a strange talking cameo from Iggy Pop. On a more positive note, Only You, performed with The Late Late Show host James Corden, is a more promising appropriation of the Vince Clarke song that once made The Flying Pickets a household name. Better follows with the excellent Chris Martin-composed Every Day's Like Christmas.
If the vast majority of this album will be forgotten long before the decorations are taken down, this infectious poppy anthem is Kylie and Christmas at somewhere close to their best.
