VA - Cool Yule - The Swinging Sound Of Christmas (2004)

If the sight of tinsel-strewn supermarkets and department stores is inspiring fits of Scroogian fury, please stop reading now. Cool Yule is making an early bid for the best - and certainly the most preposterous - Christmas album of the year.

Culled from libraries of 1960s easy listening kitsch, it is a collection of seasonal favourites - Little Drummer Boy, Jingle Bells, Good King Wenceslas - doused in piña colada and decorated with maraschino cherries. In a swirl of profound oddity, a few songs stand out as seriously peculiar. The Soulful Strings' version of Tchaikovsky's Sugar Plum Fairy music from The Nutcracker, for instance, leaps about with suspicious jauntiness before abandoning the fairies altogether to wallow among opium addicts and snake-charmers.

Even more surreal is the Joy Strings' take on O Little Town of Bethlehem, with the lyrics moulded to the music of House of the Rising Sun. If only church services would adopt such tactics: carol-singing would be so much more fun.