Midnight Chorus

The Christmas record is an art in itself — and finding the exact levels of sentimentality and heartstring-plucking without tipping over into saccharine is one of the hardest tasks imaginable to get right. If anyone can do it, though, it’s Kathryn Williams, the Liverpudlian singer-songwriter who among other things has made concept albums about Sylvia Plath and Elvis Presley’s youth into emotionally devastating statements. To be double sure, she teamed up here with Carol Anne Duffy, the sometime British poet-laureate, to provide lyrics that dip into the entire range of emotions the season provokes from loneliness and darkness to love for all mankind. Woven into song structures that are “between Beatles and hymns” as she puts it, in Williams’s impossibly pure tones, the songs are endlessly affecting.