Still and stylish

Every year musicians make us happy all stylistic directions with Christmas plates. For more abundantly they are superfluous as the visit to the mother over the Christmas holidays and manchal also a lot harder to bear.

But there are exceptions, rare, but they do exist. "Songs of December", the new album of Paul Anka is one of those rare category. What one of his first Christmas album "It's Christmas Everywhere" from 1960 (when he was 19!) Now could not necessarily say. That was rather typical Zeitgeist meter. Amazingly enough, that Anka has since approve of today the temptation to take a second and publish. Just Especially since it is in its genre as pop / jazz entertainer now obvious to some, as the Christmas albums would be expected from the dead trousers or Bob Dylan (both but happened many years ago), not to mention breathy renditions of Christmas -Classics hüftkreisender, pseudo-erotic R'n'B starlet á la "Santa Claus is coming - groan - to town - uuuh yeah baby uuuh - quite a long sigh."

With now seventy years of life and a lasting well over a half-century career, you can not just take his second album with Christmas songs with 51 years interval for the first fast way in order to serve a market. If one still decides this beaten path to walk again after such a long time, then he must have a concept of how it could succeed, but to leave marks on it.

If you read the title list of "Songs of December", first steals a complete impression of Ideenlosikeit. All tracks on the album are classic, all, better and worse, and very poor, known in hundreds of versions. Basically, the surest way to produce a completely trivial, but good salable Christmas album.

But it is precisely the awareness of totally overused classics such as "Let it snow", "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", "Santa Claus is coming to town", "Silver Bells" and of course "White Christmas", etc. can be a "Songs of December "are so valuable. Thanks Paul Anka I am with all these classics - I, no matter by whom, all could not hear without feeling the need to set up a terrorist group for the destruction of all "White Chrsitmas" recordings - reconciled. A Christmas miracle!

The whole album is absolutely stylish. Pleasant dominated by light blue-Hour Jazz, free Paul Anka by decades of abuse disfigured classics of unnecessary tinsel and blinking Christmas balls. Come to light wonderful melodies, the lyrics get back a meaning and interpretation is Anka singing become melancholy. His voice is partially so fragile that one would have to be made of wood, not stirred and spellbound listening. It looks nothing artificial or staged. There is hardly a Christmas production holistically as authentic acts, sincere touches, but not slipping whiny.
A quiet and stylish album without pace, without shrill bell-tinkling, without misplaced rhythm, for a truly merry Christmas!