Brian Luck
Contributing Writer
With Thanksgiving over, it is finally time to break out the tinsel and garland, to make paper snowflakes and popcorn garlands and to sing the songs of the season. The new Pentatonix album, “Christmas is Here!” provides the perfect background music to help set the mood while you deck the dorms.
Pentatonix released their fourth Christmas album on Oct. 26 of this year. The album features 12 songs with genres ranging from true Christmas classics to modern movie music to music from the band The Neighbourhood.
The album includes classic Christmas carols such as “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree” and “Here Comes Santa Claus” featuring Matt Sallee on the oompah bass part while Kevin Olusola beatboxes and Scott Hoying, Mitch Grassi and Kirstin Maldonado float above on the melodies and harmonies. Pentatonix keeps these older songs fresh by throwing in moments of great jazzy complexity and leaving periods of relatively bare orchestration to showcase the leading voices. Towards the end of “Here Comes Santa Claus,” the song comes to a grinding halt only to build up the chugging tempo again to the grand finale.
“Jingle Bells (With Orchestra),” performed at hyper-speed, excites the listener and keeps them on their toes with its constantly changing keys and triple versus duple feel. Other classics such as “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas,” “Waltz Of The Flowers” and “Greensleeves (Interlude)” are performed more traditionally. The haunting melody of “Greensleeves (Interlude)” leads surprisingly well into the next track, “Sweater Weather.”
The inclusion of The Neighbourhood’s “Sweater Weather” seems strange for a Christmas album, but fits surprisingly well. Another not-exactly-holiday song on the album is Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey’s “When You Believe” from the DreamWorks movie, “The Prince of Egypt.” Guest artist Maren Morris’ country voice locks into the Pentatonix sound seamlessly and makes this movie song sound like a true Christmas carol.
Pentatonix also covers less traditional but more explicitly Christmas tunes such as Stevie Wonder’s jazzy and upbeat “What Christmas Means To Me,” the very sweet “Where Are You Christmas?” from the 2000 movie “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and “Making Christmas” from Disney’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” in which the creepy characters of Halloween Town attempt to create their own version of Christmas with “spider legs and pretty bows.” It seems that Pentatonix includes these more obscure songs so that they can continue making Christmas albums without exhausting the limited supply of classics.
The track with the most modern-day relevance comes from the collaboration of Pentatonix and singer-songwriter Kelly Clarkson on “Grown-Up Christmas List” by David Foster. The moving, nostalgic song discusses an adult’s holiday wishes “Not for myself but for a world in need.” With all of the political turmoil of today’s world, this song inspires us to do more to make a change.
“Christmas is Here!” can be found in physical form at Target, Walmart, Barnes & Noble and FYE, or online from streaming services such as Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora and Amazon Music.