The Puppini Sisters - Christmas With The Puppini Sisters (Verve)
Reviewing music is always a complicated matter, but it gets exponentially moreso when Christmas is added to the equation. Everyone has strong feelings about Christmas, from the "true meaning" types who hate that the holiday has become so heavily commercialized (and ignore the fact that it wasn't even an important holiday for Christians until capitalism made it so), to those who bend over backwards to ignore the holiday and minimize its importance (whether for religious or other reasons), to those who sincerely throw themselves into the celebratory spirit every year with the same enthusiasm they had as kids (a lot of these people have kids of their own), to those who find the whole thing lonely and depressing and wait every year for it to hurry up and be over. That last category is the one I belong to, so you can imagine the trepidation of my approach to this new album by The Puppini Sisters.
The Puppini Sisters are a swing-revival group based in the UK and Italy, who perform in the close harmony vocal style popularized in the 1940s by their idols the Andrews Sisters. But on this ten-song album of Christmas carols, they have an energy that seems decidedly modern. The album begins with a version of Elton John's "Step Into Christmas" that is easily twice the speed of the original, and is far more reminiscent of Motown or Phil Spector girl-group productions of the 60s than anything that predates rock n' roll. "Step Into Christmas" is a perfect choice for the opening song, as it is doubtlessly the least-overplayed of any of the Christmas carols included here. As someone who has spent many years working retail and having Christmas music shoved down my throat every year from November 15 on, I was nonetheless unfamiliar enough with this song that I thought it was an original composition at first. Considering that the Puppini Sisters eventually move on to such hoary old chestnuts as "White Christmas" and "Let It Snow," they were smart to start the album with a tune that is comparatively fresh. It left me in the frame of mind to extend as much goodwill as I could muster towards their holiday-themed project.
In fact, their emphasis on tunes from the original swing era over even more traditional Christmas carols that date back hundreds of years was also a good idea. The strengths of their vocal approach are revealed on songs like "Santa Baby," "Winter Wonderland," and the aforementioned "Let It Snow." There's only so much they can do to tamp down the cheese factor of a few of these tunes--"Mele Kalikimaka" in particular strikes me as unsalvageable--but they manage to do a lot with material that is pretty hard to make fresh. For example, the wordless vocal interlude in the middle of "White Christmas" is lovely, even despite my overexposure to other versions of the song.
But the best part of this album is the few modern tunes to which the Puppini Sisters give their anachronistic WWII-era treatment. The aforementioned "Step Into Christmas" turns out to be orders of magnitude more pleasant than the Elton John original--which, now that I googled, I find to be eminently forgettable. And then there is their awesomely bouncy version of Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You," which starts out as the same sort of ballad as the original before suddenly swinging into one of the album's most uptempo grooves. Their version of Wham's "Last Christmas" is equally surprising, turning it into an accordion-driven waltz-time ballad one might expect to hear on the Lawrence Welk show. In this way, The Puppini Sisters conflate canonical Christmas tunes that have been part of our cultural vocabulary for most of a century with modern songs that are still more associated with their artists than with a seasonal tradition. They make the old songs sound new, the new songs sound like classics, and the whole album an enjoyable Christmas listening experience--which is a particularly challenging feat in our modern era of carol-saturated airwaves, and one The Puppini Sisters pull off with aplomb.
I'm not going to lie--I will probably not listen to this album much once I complete this review. I actively avoid Christmas music every year, and still wind up hearing more of it than I want to hear. Therefore, I'm unlikely to choose to hear even more. That said, Christmas With The Puppini Sisters is a Christmas album of the highest quality, and people who actually enjoy hearing these seasonal tunes year after year will find some fresh new approaches to the music of the holiday here.