It’s that time of year when we all celebrate the birth of our lord saviour Jesus H. Christ by eating a small squares of chocolate every day.

But we don’t call the 25th December ‘Jesus Day’. Oh no, it has to be more complicated than that. For whatever reason, it’s called ‘Christmas’. Perhaps Santa can be blamed for that mishap.

Unlike Easter or the annual mourning of our dog, Christmas has tons of hymns that we can sing to each other. But they’re all rubbish and in need of jazzing up. Sadly there aren’t many folk versions of Silent Night, but we’ll still look for you. Instead, we’ll need to keep on letting you into twee musical secrets that would be a welcome present for you to unwrap from under the tree. We’ll try and make that the last Christmas based pun. Happiest Lion deserves better than that.

As a general rule, lions aren’t the sort of creatures that you can run up to and hug. That’s unless you have a life-sized replica stuffed toy or have watched The Lion King on DVD so many times that you can’t judge what’s real any more. Basically, Walt Disney lied to us. Go up to a lion in a zoo and you’ll be met with scratches across your face and a neck-smashing headlock.

The music produced by Happiest Lion does indeed make us happy. Doing exactly what it says on the tin, we can’t fault it at all. That’s partly down to the fact that we can’t do any better, but it oddly reminds us of being on some distant countryside location in the middle of nowhere. It’s almost like a sound that could bring people together – it doesn’t aim to shock, offend or ask questions about any aspect of life.

This is the work of one person called Caleb Groh and he has done an excellent job of nailing the one-person act. Sometimes, songs performed by an individual can sound dull, flat and like they need other musicians to help beef everything up. But not here. The songs float lazily by and the inclusion of extra guitar players or even a drummer would just ruin what he had already.

There’s even a familiar song in there. Go listen.

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