Pentatonix: The greatest Christmas misses
Grammy-award winning a cappella group Pentatonix released their eighth holiday album ahead of their “The Most Wonderful Tour of the Year.” The album, titled “The Greatest Christmas Hits,” features a combination of old Pentatonix standards and new covers.
The first 24 songs on “The Greatest Christmas Hits” are just that – Pentatonix’s greatest hits. With familiar tracks like their Grammy-award-winning “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” and viral music video stand-out “White Winter Hymnal,” the first half of the album feels more like a fan-curated playlist than a new album.
While including the songs makes the title “The Greatest Christmas Hits” accurate, as most of the songs are Pentatonix’s best covers, the concept is not revolutionary for Pentatonix. In 2017, they released “A Pentatonix Christmas Deluxe,” which also pulled older tracks from previous albums and combined them with a few fresh songs.
If audiences relied on physical album copies alone to listen to Pentatonix’s music, the decision to pack the album with mostly older songs would make more sense. However, streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube negate the need to include old hits that fans might have missed out on – they can just look them up. Unfortunately, it looks like this year’s album release will have to hope that people will stick around for the new tracks.
The first new recording on the album, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” falls rather flat. Its basic, Christmas song background vocals and over-belting from lead singer Scott Hoying feel rather uninspired, especially after listening to Pentatonix’s best songs right before.
The next song, “Pure Imagination/Christmas Time Is Here,” is the most musically innovative of the new tracks. The eerie tones of “Pure Imagination” combined with the familiarity of the classic “Christmas Time Is Here” makes for a fresh, suspenseful rendition of both songs. The two are featured individually before combining at the end to form an intriguing new melodic interplay. Though the mash-up would not play well on the radio, it’s a cool display of Pentatonix’s ability to seamlessly weave songs together.
“Please Santa Please” might be the only song on this album to successfully capture Pentatonix’s contemporary holiday mood without being obnoxious about it. Led by mezzo-soprano Kirstin Maldonado, “Please Santa Please” is high-energy and radio-ready.
In jarring contrast, “O Little Town Of Bethlehem (with Elvis Presley)” is the exact opposite. Its old-timey tone meshes poorly with the rest of the album. Presley’s vintage style also clashes with Pentatonix’s determination to put a new spin on the song. While their background vocals and group sections work well on their own, the song feels disjointed and unnecessary when combined with Presley.
“Kiss From A Rose” and “Children, Go Where I Send Thee” continue to struggle. The rocking, straightforward atmosphere of “Kiss From A Rose” is a great cover overall but doesn’t mesh with the more pop-heavy hits from the rest of the album. “Children, Go Where I Send Thee” has a lot of momentum and a unique, anthem-like style, but it is so repetitive that it could have ended after the four-minute mark.
The album manages to close out with the strongly nostalgic track, “Little Toy Trains,” which is one of the few newer songs to successfully conjure nostalgic holiday memories like Pentatonix’s past albums. However, after the three previous clashing tracks, it’s a case of too little, too late for “The Greatest Christmas Hits.”
Overall, the album would have been much more successful if it figured out which holiday atmosphere it wanted to invoke and focused on presentation. In leaping from hymn-inspired covers to crooners with Elvis Presley to pop-y “I want” songs, the new pieces suffer from getting slapped together at the tail end of the album with no rhyme or reason to song order or tone, leaving audiences longing for Pentatonix albums of Christmases past.
PHOTO COURTESY OF PENN LIVE
