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.
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