Christmas In The Heart

Some will rank it among other gimcrack releases, like Dylan & the Dead. Still others will categorize it as an oddity, like Self Portrait. It’s all and none of these.

The result is polished without being glib, and a sympathetic listener may find it addictive.

Musically, it’s wonderfully bad; conceptually, it’s just wonderful.

Christmas in the Heart is an odd one-a collection of straight-ahead Christmas songs that benefits Feeding America, as well as food charities in other countries. But it will remind listeners that for nearly a decade Dylan has been working on his croon-exploring musical styles that are more polished than folk and blues.

Christmas in the Heart is, in no particular order: delightful, silly, intimate in a somewhat phony way, gentle, cornball, crazy, dated, baffling and lovable.

Our suggestion: embrace the bizarreness of it all. It's all good fun, and let's face it, even though Christmas In The Heart is unlikely to invoke a last minute panic in Best Of The Decade list makers, it's way better than Slade.

It's his unhinged vocals that make Christmas in the Heart interesting, and, in some ways, appropriate to its subject.

He fares less well on ballads--here’s hoping 'Hark The Herald Angels Sing' and 'O Come All Ye Faithful (Adeste Fideles)' don’t become live staples. But he eases into 'The Christmas Blues' adroitly, and rips up a cover of Brave Combo’s polka classic 'Must Be Santa' with lightning vocal delivery.

Apart from the breakneck 'Must Be Santa,' which barrelhouses like a barroom, Dylan doesn't really reinterpret these songs as much as simply play them with his crackerjack road band, dropping in a little flair--restoring "we'll have to muddle through somehow" to 'Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,' singing the opening of 'O Come All Ye Faithful' in its original Latin--but never pushing tunes in unexpected directions.

It's a decent album with good intentions.

Bob Dylan celebrates the Christmas hit parade the old-fashioned way: He plays it straight, as much as his pitted baritone allows, with a band that mixes David Hidalgo with R&B guitarist Phil Upchurch.

It’s Bob Dylan’s Christmas gift to you, delivered with warmth from his heart, even if his tongue is in his cheek. Like eggnog, it’s something that will always go down well once a year, even if it is probably just the once.

Dylan’s craggy voice isn’t really equipped for crooning, so the sometimes middle-brow orchestration and singing--particularly the use of backing choirs--sounds like a misguided attempt to sweeten a dish best served lightly salted.

Removed from the comfort of his own musical constructions, they often sound like a collection of rasps, croaks and burrs optimistically corralled in to what just might be words; Latin has never sounded more like a dead language than when Dylan sings in it on "O Come All Ye-Faithful". [Dec 2009, p. 87]

But, alternating between the laughable and listenable, it's safe to say there's never been anything quite like the sound of him jollily croaking his way through Her Comes Santa Claus or Hark The Herald Angles Sing. [Jan 2010, p. 119]