Ben Folds' SLEIGHER [2024]

We're not feeling the Christmas spirit (yet) this year. We usually begin dabbling in the season's music just after Thanksgiving, playing favorites from Christmases past and wading through the stack of new acquisitions we've amassed. This year, we pre-ordered four holiday titles and made plans to write them up as we listened to them for the first time. So here we are; neither our head nor our heart is fully in the game, but we designed the artwork and downloaded the cover art, so we might as well do this.

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After It's Christmas in September and The Christmas Record in mid-October, the next pre-ordered Christmas album we had ordered arrived just before Halloween, only a few days before our PC stopped powering up. Ben Folds' Sleigher was an unknown quantity and there was more of a curiosity surrounding it as we knew Folds had released a couple of less-than-traditional Christmas songs previously: "Lonely Christmas Eve" and "Bizarre Christmas Incident". We added it to the stack of two discs under the monitor and called it a stack for the first time.

01 Little Drummer Bolero

02 Sleepwalking Through Christmas

03 Me And Maurice

04 Christmas Time Rhyme

05 Waiting For Snow

06 We Could Have This

07 The Christmas Song

08 The Bell That Couldn't Jingle

09 Xmas Aye Eye

10 You Don't Have To Be A Santa Claus

Holy smokes this is a great album. We first listened to Sleigher sitting in a comfy chair, the room illuminated only by the faint amber-colored lights of the sparsely decorated lit-up Christmas tree. The album took us to an imagined Christmas special in the disc's cover art animation style. The piano-driven music felt like a familiar soundtrack; the songs are just that good. We immediately replayed "Christmas Time Rhyme" a couple of times and there is something about the production of "The Bell That Couldn't Jingle" that lowered the ambient temperature in the room a couple of noticeable degrees, giving us a pleasant chill. Whatever "Xmas Aye Eye" is sticks out like a red-nosed reindeer on this album but we don't have the heart to ding it a bit. Sleigher will be getting more spins for sure. Bonus: Listening to this album had us going back through the HERChives, digging out his previous albums and compilations. Will be listening to more Ben Folds music in 2025.

LISTEN