All the Best For Christmas, Gaspard Royant (Bellvue Music)

Gaspard is a French singer with some musical roots in the UK R'nB scene, and for 2024 he drops a Christmas album with mostly original tunes and a couple of covers. Several of these were previously released, by the way. The sound is somewhere between old-school soul and pop, depending on the tune. He duets with Nicole Atkins on "Perfect Christmas Song," a solid pop-rocker, opens the collection strongly with "Home For Christmas," offers a midtempo "Winter Night," and covers "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" competently though no better. "Wishing You a Merry Christmas" is another duet with Aurélie Saada, "Next Train to Memory Lane" is a midtempo pop ballad, and "Xmas & the 3 Wise Men" hovers somewhere between Tenacious D and the "Big Bang Theory" fake band Footprints on the Moon, unintentionally so I'd imagine. "(C'mon Baby) It's Christmas Time!" is a cool rocker in a pop-rockabilly vein, the cover of "White Christmas" is a crooner arrangement with a mock martial beat backing the ballad tempo, and "Christmas Prayer" is another ballad whose sentiment is as advertised by the title. Some solid original songs here, with the Nicole Atkins duet being the class of the collection, and you can download and stream it wherever you get music. While tracking this down, I discovered Gaspard is quite the Christmas music fan, with a 2017 EP Wishing You a Merry Christmas that oddly doesn't include the song of that title, but features two songs not on the current album, "Last Christmas" and "New Year's Eve," a 2016 EP I Can't Believe It's Christmas (and Other Xmas Songs) featuring the title song, a duet with Eli "Paperboy" Reed on "Christmas Time Again," plus covers of "Everything's Gonna Be Cool This Christmas" and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)," and the single "Christmas Is Back In Town," a fairly cool number dating back to 2015.