The Holiday season is upon us and as always, there’s a raft of new releases each competing to join the exclusive club of Christmas classics and ensure an annual end of year bonus off the back of holiday record sales.
Easily the strongest effort of the year is Kelly Clarkson’s Wrapped in Red, a slick blend of original tracks and traditional covers. Clarkson’s raspy vocal suits the old-school charm of original track ‘Wrapped in Red’. “You’re here, where you should be, snow is falling as the carollers sing, it just wasn’t the same alone on Christmas day,” Clarkson croons over bouncy piano keys on the lead single ‘Underneath The Tree’, a toe-tap inducing number that leaves you tingling all over Christmas. There’s old school jazz and glamour, and even the covers like ‘White Christmas’ have some real energy behind them. The album altogether has real class.
Just falling short of the top spot of releases is Leona Lewis’s mo-town influenced holiday collection Christmas With Love. Lead single ‘One More Sleep’ is a classy affair but the upbeat tempo doesn’t suit Lewis’s normally soaring ballad voice. Unlike Clarkson she’s relying too heavily on covers to carry the album, and really there are only so many times a person can hear ‘Winter Wonderland’ covered. That being said, some of the more classical tracks on the album show off Lewis’s voice to a great extent, like ‘Ave Maria’. It’s just a shame the album is so inconsistent.
The last big name Christmas album of the season, and possibly the oddest collection, is Mary J. Blige’s A Mary Christmas. Yes, I kid you not – someone got paid to come up with that name. Blige just sounds lost on the album. She gets completely overshadowed by Jessie J’s annoyingly impressive vocal gymnastics on ‘Do You Hear What I Hear’. However, it is the catchiest of the covers on the album, and there is a hilarious ‘diva-off’ moment, where if you didn’t know any better you’d think they were having an urgent chat about whether the other one could hear them. Despite having superstar production from David Foster, it’s just an album of bland covers and some even bizarre ones. ‘My Favourite Things’ from The Sound of Music is on the album, and Blige sings with only a very limited range on most of the tracks. Bah humbug indeed.