Jingle Bell Rock, Trap, and Adult Contemporary: 2013's Christmas Albums Are Actually Awesome

Consider, for a moment, how strange it would be if Kelly Clarkson made an album that opened with two “wall of sound” Phil Spector-esque originals then followed up with a ballad on which she was accompanied only by strings, some Chuck Berry blues rock, horn-heavy Stax R&B, honky-tonk country, big band, surf rock, and a duet with Reba McEntire. Would it sell? Would critics care? Well, thanks to Wrapped in Red, her recent Greg Kurstin-produced Christmas LP, we can answer conclusively: Yes, it would move 70,000 in its first week and would go platinum before the second Sunday of advent; and no, it would get warm reviews from newspapers and magazines but never enter into the larger conversation.

This is understandable, yes, but it’s also a little unfortunate. Wrapped in Red is, in fact, an excellent pop record, not only the best holiday album of the year but a holiday album that seems to be set on making all other holiday albums redundant. Where, say, Leona Lewis’s December Christmas, With Love is essentially an album-length tribute to Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift For You and Mary J. Blige’s October-released A Mary Christmas tends toward David Foster-produced adult contemporary, Clarkson’s record pastiches all of that and more, offering a variety that practically puts her in competition with her biggest channel of distribution, FM radio.

FM radio, however, has plenty of new firepower of its own, as quality, interesting holiday music has recently been released by a variety of artists beyond those mentioned above. It doesn’t take a freelance writer to figure out why backwards-looking records would be popular this time of year (for one, the construction of an idyllic past has been an important part of the holiday at least since Meet Me in St. Louis; for two, only olds would spend money to own yet another rendition of “Little Drummer Boy”) but who else is going to listen to them all and report back what they hear?

Well, kind reader, my Christmas gift for you continues with “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk” country singer Trace Adkins’s The King’s Gift, a collection of standards that finds sonic inspiration across the Atlantic in Ireland, a place where Christmas is celebrated with a lump of pudding and the honky tonks are, from what I gather, as rare as the badonkadonks. Naturally, one song features the Chieftans. Surprisingly, another features Kevin Costner. Trace might say that this ain’t no thinkin’ thing—somewhat as he does on his breakthrough 1997 number one, “(This Ain’t) No Thinkin’ Thing”—but when it comes to constructing idyllic pasts for country music, his move here is not without precedent: When early musicologists attempted to deny African-American contributions to the genre, they did it by overstating the connection between Appalachian and Irish folks songs. In other words, this Christmas is about as white as they come.

Moving forward, the next logical step would be the Robertson Family’s Duck the Halls, a record that focuses less on pastiche and more on using the best pitch correction software Santa’s elves could assemble in order to make singers out of a family best known for their remarkable mallard imitations, but let’s instead jump to Tamar Braxton’s Winter Loversland. While I may not have the word count to convince you that Braxton’s Love and War is one of the best R&B albums of 2013, allow me to use what precious space I have to point out that her take on “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” includes, if nothing else, some of the year’s most tasteful—and seasonal!—trap hi-hats.

Likewise, your very Baauer Christmas continues with SpinKing, the New York DJ whose “Body Operator” was a minor club hit in 2012 and whose [Merry SPINmas mixtape](http:// http://www.datpiff.com/DJ-Spin-King-Merry-SPINmas-mixtape.555034.html) dropped on Tuesday. Despite the title, the Krampus-themed cover, and the fact that I pushed back this essay’s due date in order to include it, SPINmas has virtually no holiday content, instead chopping 57 of the year’s hottest rap songs into a single hour-and-16-minute mix. It’s actually pretty great. The title, however, only comes up when Maino drops in to shout out the DJ and introduce his “One Bad Bitch,” at which points things go slightly ary: “This is Merry SPINmas, whatever the fuck this nigga name of this mixtape is. Merry Spinmas? Merry Christmas, motherfucker. It is what it is.”

The task of holiday hip-hop in 2013 thus falls to TobyMac the 49 year-old Virginian whose former trio, DC Talk, was one of the most popular Christian acts of the past few decades and whose last solo album earned him one Grammy and four GMA Dove Awards. Where 2011’s Owl City collab “The First Noel” (off his Christmas in Diverse City) is so atrocious that I briefly considered the possibility that it might be part of a Krampus-backed plot to destroy not only Christmas but Christian music altogether, the pair’s 2013 collab “Light of Christmas” (theme song to VeggieTales’s Merry Larry and the True Light of Christmas), is not only sort of charming but also sort of (believe it or not) progressive, an electronic track that, three minutes in, even releases to a small EDM drop.