Friday, 12 October 2018

Eric Clapton - Happy Xmas


Rating: 3/5

Review:
A mixed bag

Well, it could have been worse. I was rather dreading Happy Xmas even though I’ve been a Clapton admirer for over 50 years now, and if it had been by anyone else I wouldn’t have touched this with a tinsel-tipped bargepole. With a very few notable exceptions (Thea Gilmore, Phil Spector and Kate Rusby, for example) Christmas albums are almost invariably frightful. Happy Xmas is frightful in places, but I’m pleased to say that there’s some good stuff on it, too.

The best bits of this album are three very decent blues tracks in different styles: Christmas Tears, Lonesome Christmas and Merry Christmas Baby. There are some sentimental but bearable seasonal songs and some truly dreadful things like Away In A Manger, Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas and Jingle Bells, (which is a vacuous techno-dance sort of thing). Given that I was braced for the whole thing to be unspeakably awful, I was mildly pleasantly surprised that at least some of it is good.

Ericophiles like me will certainly want this, but the best I can say of it is that it’s good in places. Your taste may differ from mine, of course, and Eric has earned the right to record whatever he wants, but my advice is to be prepared for a lot of rather grim stuff between the highlights. Even as a believer that EC remains a major deity, I can only give this a lukewarm recommendation.

No comments:

Post a Comment