Having spent the better part of a month — longer, frankly, than I expected to — listening to unfamiliar Christmas albums, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a fair amount of a gold out there amidst the dross. I generally tried to avoid listening to anything that I had reason to think would be a bad experience, and wasn’t always successful. But on the whole, I’m kind of surprised at how many of the albums I picked sort of randomly turned out to be pretty good.

For those of you that didn’t follow along, here’s a quick summary:

The Best

The highest possible rating was five stars, but none of the albums I reviewed got higher than four. So they may not be all-time classics, but these were, in my opinion, the best albums I stumbled across over the last month.

Dave Brubeck, A Dave Brubeck Christmas
Mantovani, Mantovani Orchestra Performs Christmas Classics
Mindy Smith, My Holiday

The Next Best

The next list includes the albums that received three and a half stars.

John Denver, A Rocky Mountain Christmas
Ron Korb and Donald Quan, Seasons
Bethany McCade, A Little Christmas
Over the Rhine, Snow Angels
Kim Robertson, Christmas Lullaby

The rest of the albums are more hit-and-miss, though you will find at least one or two moderately good songs on all but the Annie Lennox abomination, A Christmas Cornucopia, which was the worst album I reviewed. So here’s a playlist that includes the best tracks from all of the albums I reviewed, except that one because the whole thing is terrible.

1. “O Come O Come Emmanuel”, Synergy Brass Quartet
2. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”, Gypsy Soul
3. “The First Noel”, Robin Bullock
4. “Christmas Time Is Here”, Bethany McCade
5. “We Three Kings”, Ron Korb and Donald Quan
6. “Santa Will Find You”, Mindy Smith
7. “Christmas For Cowboys”, Jars of Clay
8. “I Saw Three Ships”, Mantovani
9. “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”, Lena Horne
10. “Mele Kalikimaka”, Heather Henry
11. “Mistletoe and Holly”, Christie McCarthy
12. “Here Comes Santa Claus”, Bob Dylan
13. “Here It Is”, Over the Rhine
14. “Winter Wonderland”, Dave Brubeck
15. “Riu Riu Chiu”, Quattrottave
16. “What Child Is This”, John Denver
17. “In The Bleak Midwinter”, Kim Robertson
18. “Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town”, The Ray Conniff Singers
19. “Angels In The Snow”, David Arkenstone
20. “White Christmas”, Shelby Lynne
21. “Auld Lang Syne”, James Taylor

I hope you enjoy the tunes. Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I have conflicting views on instrumentals. On the one hand, they can be haunting and beautiful, like the entries in Ron Korb and Donald Quan’s Seasons. But on the other hand, like that same album, they tend not to grab my attention. I wonder if they affect me on some subconscious level, but instrumental albums always seem shorter than vocal ones, probably because I stop really paying attention.

This is a good album though. It could be described as new age, I suppose, but it’s peaceful and melancholy. It’s basically piano and gentle woodwinds (I assume Korb plays one and Quan plays the other). “We Three Kings” is especially good, and I like hearing “The Huron Carol” now and then. There’s a misty-eyedness to even the most cheerful songs on the album, but the music isn’t depressing. It’s the kind of album you play on Christmas Night, when your heart is a little heavy with the knowledge that the holiday is mere hours from being out of your life for another year.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

And that’s that.

So far, all of the albums I’ve reviewed have been of the single-artist variety, but the Christmas music market is dominated by compilations. I’ve been trying to ignore them — in the age of iTunes and mp3 downloads, they’re kind of pointless — but I stumbled upon 2004′s Maybe This Christmas Tree (it’s a pun: it’s the third album in the Maybe This Christmas series), and the lineup caught my attention. I don’t normally go for rock and roll carols, but what the hey? It’s got all your favorite slightly underground acts from the early twenty-first century.

Sadly and strangely, I think this is a little too hipster for me, and I live in Portland! For starters, you’ve got covers of both Lennon’s (Polyphonic Spree) and McCartney’s (Tom McRae) Christmas offerings. McRae actually manages to improve on Sir Paul’s version — the easiest feat ever — by basically just mumbling through it. Jars of Clay does a graceful cover of “Christmas for Cowboys”, and the Ravonettes do a nice job on “The Christmas Song” (which is not “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire”).

The rest of the album isn’t as strong. Ivy is my favorite band on this album, but I don’t care for their “Christmastime Is Here”, and “Fairytale of New York” (Pilate) is flat out gross. And I’m already on record detesting “Baby It’s Cold Outside”, sleazily handled by Royal Crown Revue. Death Cab for Cutie and Pedro the Lion acquit themselves nicely, but not memorably. My main problem is that I don’t think I’d want to listen to most of these songs even if they had nothing to do with Christmas. Add in that extra burden of being “holiday” music, and the album falls short.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Finally, a Christmas album for fans of Garden State!

Mantovani has been dead for thirty years, but like Tupac, he keeps putting out records. As best I can tell, he and his famed orchestra only released two Christmas LPs in his lifetime, but there have been many collections since. I settled on Mantovani Orchestra Performs Christmas Classics primarily because it was a manageable length. A few of these tracks — “I Saw Three Ships” and “The Twelve Days of Christmas” — were part of the annual Christmas mixtape that defined my childhood, but the rest are new to me.

Everything on the album is majestic. Sometimes that quality doesn’t really fit, like on “The Holly and the Ivy”, a song that was never meant to be sung with such bombast. And over time, you might get the feeling that you’re celebrating Christmas in an Italian restaurant. But there’s no denying the quality of the musicianship. Sometimes you want mellow and sometimes you want enough sound to fill the Hollywood Bowl. This album is for when you need the latter. Mantovani is usually identified with easy listening, but this is not elevator music. It is symphonic, and it is wonderful.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

I suspect you’ll get more or less the same impact from any of the other Mantovani Christmas collections, depending on how much time you want to spend with the orchestra.

Bethany McCade is not a star. In fact, she’s not even on the map. She’s a singer and actress trying to make her mark in Houston, Texas, and A Little Christmas is her second album. Despite all the obstacles a person faces when trying to produce music on their own — finances, technology, distribution to name a few — she’s managed to put out a collection of recordings that is vastly superior to any number of releases from household names.

What makes A Little Christmas work? Well, it’s clearly a labor of love. There’s nothing crass about it. The song list is eclectic, including several titles that were new to me. McCade seems to be throwing the kitchen sink at it instrumentally, and that sometimes overwhelms her voice, which is smallish and a little childlike. The arrangements are jaunty and fun . “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve” — which is rapidly becoming a standard on jazz vocal albums like this — is usually pretty lugubrious, but McCade’s interpretation is downright snappy.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

I don’t know if a successful singing career is in the cards for Bethany McCade, but she handles Christmas quite nicely.

Christie McCarthy’s voice is a little off-putting — it’s in that uncomfortable range where you can’t quite tell if the singer is male or female — but once that confusion is out of the way, it’s easy to enjoy Winter, a collection of familiar, mostly secular Christmas carols (“Silent Night” being the lone sacred hymn).

The production is professional and restrained, although I’m not completely sure how to categorize the style — it’s sort of like jazz, but there’s a prominent electric guitar on all of the numbers. In any case, despite its rock and roll elements, the album is very laid back. I’d probably describe it as soporific if McCarthy had a more conventional voice. But it works, even on sprightly tunes like “Mistletoe and Holly”, which might be the only song on the album that hasn’t been done to death by everyone else.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

The songs may be familiar, but they sound a little different when McCarthy sings them.

I don’t know how he did it, but someone Bob Dylan has figured out how to travel through time, and has journeyed back to the 1940s to cut an album with Bing Crosby’s backup singers. Christmas in the Heart has a wonderful old-timey feel. It plays like an old, comfortable sweater of an album from the middle of the twentieth century. I really like the way these songs are arranged.

Unfortunately, Dylan didn’t find a way to send his voice back in time to an era when it was merely bad. He has to strain to sing anything on this album. Of course, Dylan’s gifts have always been his songwriting rather than his crooning, which is why it’s kind of disappointing that none of these songs are originals. If it weren’t Dylan, you’d never put up with this singing, and I’m not convinced you should put up with it from him in this case. Bob seems to be enjoying himself, and it is a fun record. But I can’t imagine it holding up to repeated listening.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Once the shock of Bob Dylan singing Christmas carols wears off, it’s just an old guy with no voice getting on your nerves.

I have all the respect in the world for Annie Lennox and her illustrious pop music career, but this is one of the worst Christmas albums I’ve ever heard. Right off the bat, it’s tinny and cold, replete with electric keyboard and strings. Without the vocals, this would basically be a Yanni album, but then Lennox starts singing and everything gets worse. She is in terrible vocal form on this album, and there’s nothing the various, constant filtering and “Autotuning” can do to rescue her.

“See Amid the Winter’s Snow” is actually a pretty song (ruined by Pro Tools), but A Christmas Cornucopia (God, even the title is awful!) has nothing else going for it. Lennox’s “Lullay Lullay (Coventry Carol) is terrifying, and the final song “Universal Child”, while comparably restrained musically, has lyrics that are just insufferable. On a few of the songs, Lennox’s voice breaks in like a punch in the face. I can’t believe how bad this album is.

Rating: 1 out of 5 stars

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.