Behold, the Christmas titan. . .
Album Title: Merry Christmas
Album Artist: Andy Williams
This album is going to be kinda hard to review, folks.
I mean, c'mon - it's Andy frickin' Williams. The guy stands in the pantheon of Christmas music - alongside Nat King Cole, Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra - as one of the most well-known in the genre. Many of his versions of Christmas songs are Holiday classics, and you've heard them all your life. Some of his versions are THE versions of these songs, and when an artist gets to this level of Christmasdom it's difficult to objectively analyze the music itself. It's like analyzing your memories, or analyzing the nostalgia of the Holidays themselves. And so before we go any further with this, I'm going to come out at state that I'm going to try and remain as objective as humanly possible in reviewing Andy's album here. . . but give me some grace.Andy is cut from the same cloth as the previously mentioned heavyweights, with a crooning style that is part campy variety show and part Las Vegas casino. He's a little less 'Vegas' than Frank and Dean, though - I don't think Andy could have kept up with the hard-partying Rat Pack back in the day. Not sure if it's the subject matter, his voice, his image, or the dude's overall vibe. . . but he's kinda like the Canada to the Rat Pack's U.S.A. The crooning sounds similar, but this is a little less 'edgy,' I guess.
Several songs on here are safe selections, but none of his best-known Holiday songs are on this particular album. You get the feeling while listening to this one that his other Christmas album - which must surely contain all the aforementioned hits - was the first one he did, so then he released this follow-up album to capitalize on the craze. He picks a few holiday standards that are hard to screw up, and the production value and backing music that accompany his singing is pretty solid. But then he side-steps the safe, conventional path that would have landed him, like, a '6' for this album and doubles down on a few weird song choices that, while they may have something to do with Christmas (it's hard to tell sometimes), they're not familiar Holiday songs. And they gravitate to the more somber, religious side of the spectrum.
Nobody cares about your range, Andy - skip the introspective stuff and just focus on knocking out the recognizable shit.
'My Favorite Things' makes a random appearance on this album. Not entirely sure why it does, it's not a Christmas song at all. And honestly I can't even listen to this song without thinking of the Nazis trying to hunt down and capture Julie Andrews so they can ship her off to a concentration camp (at least that's what I think happens in the movie, but it's been quite a few years since I've seen that one.) Andy's version is okay, but Mary Poppins definitely did it better.In summary, there's not a ton wrong with this. If he's guilty of anything here it's recording songs that are done by other people - in the exact same crooning style as them, but not doing it as well as them. Kinda like when you listen to Greta Van Fleet for a couple songs, who sound exactly like a Led Zeppelin cover band, then turning it off and going, "Okay, now I'm gonna go listen to Led Zeppelin."
For that reason, I think I'm gonna have to pass on this one. Andy does a decent enough job, but I can't imagine putting any of these songs on any of my Amazon playlists when there are better, similarly-sounding Christmas songs out there to use instead. If I had space for a hundred Holiday records, I could be talked into holding onto this, but Christmas real estate in The Colonel's Record Collection is cutthroat.Better luck next time, Andy.
VERDICT: 5/10 - Meh (A swing-and-a-miss from one of Christmas' heavyweights. Had he stuck to his guns and played it safe, he could have scored higher on this, but he's got a lot of lesser-known songs on here that hamstring the album's potential.)
- SHELVED-
- Brian
