(courtesy EMI Australia)
Hailing from Sydney, Australia, Matthew Ifield is an up-and-coming 18-year-old singer who has the gloriously lovely voice of an old soul.
He brings his nuanced and warmly emotive vocals to full winning effect on A Christmas Album which comes the singer fervent love of the season.
I love Christmas… I love being around my family… setting up Christmas lights around the house, putting up the tree. Christmas will always be around; that’s why Christmas songs will always be around. Music will always be changing, but traditional Christmas songs will remain. (EMI)
This enduring love affair with Christmas is on full display on every single track on the seven-track album which includes all standards such as ‘It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas”, “White Christmas” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and which sounds delightfully retro without mindlessly doing a bog standard ticking of the seasonally music boxes.
In other words, Ifield manages to pay homage to the classic sound of Christmas while sounding freshly vibrant, the result no doubt of his approach to these standards – “I have always loved the jazz quartet feel … the double bass, the piano, the guitar and the wire brush jazz drums … I like all these jazzy piano chords. And I try to incorporate that into contemporary music.”
There’s a lushness and warmth to A Christmas Album which has that heartwarming, soul-reviving intangible sound of Christmas that makes these albums such a beautifully rewarding listening experience.
And honestly isn’t that why we listen to Christmas albums?
We want to feel soothed, to feel hugged, to feel wrapped in all the goodness and loveliness of the season and Ifield’s voice deliver in spades on that front in A Christmas Album, offering up seven superbly-delivered songs that sound like the exact sort of comfort you want after a hard, difficult year.
That the songs are delivered with such humanity is testament to what a prodigious young talent Ifield is; he has a remarkable ability to not simply sing the words and hit the right notes but to imbue them all with a grounded wonder at the season that makes them truly come alive.
It’s a rare balancing act too to be able to sound old worldly and contemporary simultaneously but Ifield manages it with ease, his voice dancing across the music with the passion of a pop song while doing more than perfunctory homage to the crooners of old.
It’s a deliciously uplifting mix that has a buoyancy of emotion to it that you need in any Christmas album.
You walk away from listening to this album, and trust me it will be repeated over and over and you will never tire of hearing every single song multiple times, feeling like all the emotional battle scars of the last 300-plus days of the year have been swept away in favour of a contented sense of being at one with the season and the world.
That’s a remarkable achievement for any Christmas album but especially one by an nascent 18-yearold singer (albeit one who’s been active in singing circles since he was four) and it reflects what can happen when the past and the present are allowed to mix with real creative freedom.
A Christmas Album is a gem, one of those albums that won’t just musically burnish this Christmas but many Christmases to come which will truly feel make the season feel like the most wonderful time of year every time you listen.