It’s been a long time cooking, but as with all eagleowl fare, their latest dish is best eaten slowly, savoured at leisure, and served when it’s icicle cold outside. If only all records at Christmas sounded like this.

With the various members of eagleowl sticking their fingers into their various other pies over the last year since the glorious For The Thoughts You Never Had EP, this is the first recorded output of 2009. Since timing is everything though, on this evidence, it’s been well worth the wait. Amid the jingles and Christmas singles old and new that infest everything with a speaker during December, this is a roasting fire, this is friends and wine and quiet and thought. This, thankfully, is about as far from ‘Jingle Bell Rocks’ as you can be.

There’s no musical departure from the eagleowl norm here, just lashings and lashings of their drowsy, dreamy, folk-induced haze, with the title track’s opening strings slowly putting the brakes on the nightmares before Christmas, and settling you gently back into calm. This won’t raise your pulse – quite the opposite – but sometimes that’s what you need, without knowing it.

Eagleowl might have come out from a year’s quiet hibernation just as the rest of us are settling in for the winter, but they’ve brought with them a perfect soundtrack to the dark nights.

Sleep The Winter is launched TONIGHT (Friday Dec 11th) at The Bowery (2 Roxburgh Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9SU) from 7.30. Guaranteed to be the best fiver you’ve spent in a while. Get there early too, there’ll be special guests, and since eagleowl know everyone, they’ll be dead good…

Oh, and the single will be available from select independent record
stores, and to order via www.eagleowlattack.co.uk and www.kilterschmilter.co.uk from Dec 14th with the second eagleowl EP due early 2010. Marvellous.