The music year in review

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This was an exceptional year in many ways for the ever-thriving Louisville music scene. LEO received almost a hundred records from our neighbors alone, a healthy sign of a fertile bed.

Americana quartet Houndmouth came from out of seemingly nowhere (well, OK, New Albany) and went from playing to dozens to selling out Headliners Music Hall, releasing their first EP through London’s Rough Trade Records, recording their first full-length, and touring around the country.

The Forecastle Festival celebrated its 10th anniversary with the biggest and best fest yet, co-curated by My Morning Jacket, who enjoyed another year of touring, seeing a million faces, and rocking them all.

Wax Fang returned, though without drummer Kevin Ratterman, who finally moved his recording studio out of his family’s funeral home, making it slightly less weird but much more functional.

In the wake of ear X-tacy’s demise, several smaller, more niche-oriented stores popped up (often inside other stores) and kept buyers supplied with everything from vintage vinyl to new underground cassettes.

The most important news this year was also the worst, as musician, artist and writer Jason Noble passed across the eighth dimension, after a three-year fight for his life. The legacy he left was far greater than his circumstances, and he will live on forever in the hearts of everyone he impacted.

On a happier note, here’s a look back at some of the music LEO critics enjoyed listening to, discussing and writing about this year:

The Filthy Fifteen
Filthy Rich
Producer, bassist and beatmaker Richard Herrell worked his contacts list to put together his first “producer album” with some of the city’s nastiest emcees. Rich’s production is dark, brooding — think Dre’s minor key melancholia with a boom-bap bend. — Damien McPherson

Grand National Dreams
Jalin Roze
Grand National Dreams is, simply, great. The title is a double entendre, a paean to the 1980s car, but more fittingly, a horizon-deep look at the future — a glimpse to Jalin’s expanse beyond our borders and to his grand national reality. — DM

Half Asleep Upon Echo Falls
Whistle Peak
Highly recommended for lovers of sounds both familiar and surprising, this makes quiet sound confident and vibrant while retaining bouncy hooks and harmonies. — PB

Little Heater
Catherine Irwin
Catherine Irwin is nothing if not patient. Her songs are leisurely and deliberate, seductive in their Southern Gothic charms for those who let them take over. Irwin’s songs are beautiful but dark, tinged with a pinch of humor and a pound of lonesome, and her country has more in common with Hank Sr. or Hazel Dickens than modern pop stars like Blake Shelton. — PB

Look Harder
Actual People
CJ Prof is one of the most aggressive yet nimble emcees you’ll ever hear. The passion, anger and humor he displays throughout the disc will carry the group as far as they’re willing to travel. The production is a dense, at times murky gumbo of rock guitar, breakbeats and live deejaying. — DM

Melt
The Pass
Melt stands out in contrast against a wash of hybrid indie-disco-punk-dance bands with accomplished songwriting and remarkably pristine production. — Jon Paul Hill

On a Passing Cloud
Murals
Murals have been subtly honing their craft for a while now, concocting an indie-psych buzz sound from an earlier era, or at least a different time zone. — PB

Our Home Is a Deathbed
Xerxes
With a multidimensional approach to hardcore — from thrashing caustic punk to more emotional, swelling melodic moments — Xerxes craft a focused vision that gives Home a dense and unique vibe. — Austin Weber

Red Parole
Seluah
Seluah’s long-gestating first full-length album is nothing short of a masterpiece. A hypothetical soundtrack for a chilling, sexed-up Nicholas Ray film noir filled with double-crossings, misbegotten sex and stolen money, Red Parole is a precise, sensual overload of cutting riffs, floating rhythms and haunting vocals. — PB

Sandpaper Dolls
Sandpaper Dolls
Each song, although a cappella, has percussive elements, a bassline and a melody. That percussion is reflected in various shapes and forms on their self-titled studio album. The occasional echo gives the three-part harmonies an otherworldly, timeless quality. — Danielle Sills

We’re looking forward to a lot next year, including new music from Wax Fang, Liberation Prophecy, Cheyenne Mize, Johnny Berry & the Outliers, Appalatin, Justin Paul Lewis, the aforementioned Houndmouth, plus Jim James’ long-awaited first solo album. We’re excited to get our world rocked by the next left-field surprise, and thankful for another year of sharing the adventure with you.

Photo by Ron Jasin.

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

People Issue - The Healer: Kim Carpenter

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When you go to see Dr. Kim Carpenter, she does not play around.

“Our approach to health is looking at you as a whole person, and then we address the way you eat, the way you move, the way you think, and the way that you live your life through your nervous system, to see what you would need to do to be healthier over the next five years.”

Dr. Carpenter is an athletic mother of two young kids, a chiropractor and the owner of Awaken to Wellness in St. Matthews. She agrees with my attempt to summarize it as a one-stop shop combining trips to the doctor, the gym, yoga and other medical hot spots.

Her facility also includes massage and acupuncture treatments, and they work with people’s eating issues, customizing meal plans. These plans help weight loss as well as balancing blood sugar and helping to wean people off processed foods, what she calls “getting you to eat real, live food.”

Some people come because they’re in physical pain. Some “know that, with our current health care system, the average person is sicker in five years, not healthier, and they want to find out ways that they can stay well.” It takes a variety of approaches to work with a variety of problems, and they see patients from babies to the elderly.

If it sounds like an alternative approach to medicine, Carpenter doesn’t disagree. Do people ever tell her what she does sounds weird? “Oh, yeah!” she laughs. “Unfortunately, in our culture, what I do is alternative medicine, or alternative health, and I think until our country decides that being pro-active would be the norm, then we will continue to be a sick culture … When mainstream health care is about lifestyle, that’s when we’ll see a shift in the way people live.”

Carpenter played volleyball in high school and college, and doctor visits for back pain led her to change her diet, improving her health and reducing those Ohio Valley allergies. By high school, her life’s work was laid out for her. Today she also continues to work with athletes in high schools, at the University of Louisville, and at the pro level.

But Carpenter isn’t the only successful professional in her family. Her sister Jennifer, who knew what she wanted to do while still in grade school, has carved out a career playing some of the unhealthiest Americans in fictional entertainment, as the title character in the movie “The Exorcism of Emily Rose” and as the foul-mouthed, brother-loving Debra Morgan on Showtime’s “Dexter.”

“Both my parents are very driven individuals in their own way,” Carpenter says. “They both gave us freedom, taught us the value of things, and the quality of not only material things but of people. They both just let us be who we were … We had no idea that certain things, to some people, wouldn’t seem possible. Anything we wanted to achieve was possible with hard work, determination and confidence.”

Family is central to Carpenter in every way; she says that families do even better with her program than individuals because they’re accountable to each other, not just to the doctor. Not everyone is ready for her approach, but she’ll be there when they are.

“The challenges in life are the exact same reasons why I’m happier and healthier down the road,” she says. “They teach you the most.”

Photo by Frankie Steele.

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

People Issue - The Radio Host: Berk Bryant

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When public radio is at its best, it brings music, community and a strong point of view together in a way that can’t be faked. And while WFPK-FM has a heaping handful of local talent, none can quite be compared to Berk Bryant, the authentically genial host of “Sunday Bluegrass.”

Aged 82 years, Bryant’s both a radio and Army veteran, and a bluegrass lifer. He got his start in radio in his hometown of Lynchburg, Va., in 1954. “Then,” he says, “bluegrass was country. It was all called country” before mainstream country music evolved and became more distinct from the pure ’grass, old time and traditional country Bryant shares each week. “I like my bluegrass bluegrass. If you don’t know what to call what you’re playing, don’t call it bluegrass!”

Bryant served in Korea, worked for 12 years as a counter-intelligence special agent, and ran the closed-circuit radio station at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. In his last decade of active service, Bryant was sent to Oahu, Hawaii (“somebody messed up,” he laughs), then Fort Knox, and in his last year, back to Korea. “I didn’t mind that, because there are a lot worse places,” says Bryant. He retired in 1982, having reached the rank of sergeant first class.

Through the years, he met a young Elvis Presley and befriended John Hartford, the riverboat man and influential singer-songwriter, and Ralph Stanley, the “Man of Constant Sorrow.” He doesn’t play any instruments himself. “When they’re talking about music and say ‘key,’ a key to me is something you start the car with,” he laughs.

He began his WFPK show — say it with me now, “the shortest, fastest and bestest three hours in radio” — in 1989, seeking to fill a void in the station’s programming. “Friends of mine in Radcliff,” where he lives now, “who knew about my love for the music asked me, ‘Why don’t you go to public radio?’” A couple years later, he showed up.

“I didn’t know anybody there, and nobody there knew me. I just asked to see the manager.” That manager was interested in Bryant’s idea but commented that the station didn’t really have much bluegrass. Bryant told him he had plenty at home. The manager asked, “Do you think you have enough to sustain a one-hour show?”

“‘Yeah, I think so’ … 23 years later …” laughs the man who gave himself the nickname “The Country Gentleman.” Two years later, the show had expanded to its present three-hour length, heard Sunday nights from 8-11 p.m. On New Year’s Day, he’ll also continue his two-decade-long tradition of playing nothing but Hank Williams music between noon and 3 p.m. on WFPK.

He drives in from Radcliff each week to share the best of today and yesterday from his collection of more than 1,000 CDs, some 45s and “close to 20 linear feet of LPs.” A large part of his happy longevity on the air can be explained by one simple fact: “No one tells me what to play.”

Photo by Casey Chalmers.

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

Vice Tricks jump up and down

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I’m not a sick boy, I’m not a well boy
I’m just a man who likes his music really, really loud. —“Rock & Roll”

King and Verity Vice are a couple made for each other, like Lulu and Sailor in “Wild at Heart” or Johnny and June. The leaders of the self-described “Psycho Rock” band Vice Tricks, they are proud parents of a new album, the self-titled full-length debut of their four-year-old band.

After releasing a couple of EPs recorded with friends “in exchange for getting them stoned,” the band — which also includes guitarist Jeremy Climer and drummer Ian Bottomley — went to Sneak Attack Studios in Lexington to document their sound professionally, having won the studio time in a competition.

Singer/songwriter/guitarist King, who downplays his first name, Jeremy, professionally, and Vice — known to the government as Verity Jones — met 15 years ago at a show he was playing at Pandemonium on Bardstown Road and quickly became “best friends,” they agree, from the motorcycle ride they took through Cherokee Park the next day through today.

Vice began playing her signature upright bass while King was still playing with his old band, Dead City Rejects, which lasted a decade. When that ended, “I wanted to start something new,” King says, “so I asked her to join, and we started this band.”

They were called Parlor Tricks first. “We changed it because we thought it didn’t really fit the direction of the music,” Vice says, as King adds, “Plus, there were five other bands out there called Parlor Tricks,” in addition to the long-running local band Parlour.

Their band is “a weird twist on a couple different genres,” King says. “We mix in kind of the old rockabilly, the faster psychobilly, but then we have pianos and keytars in it, but the overall feel is … I think we’d compare it to the Stray Cats meets Social Distortion …” Vice chimes in, “Meets Nekromantix meets … I would just, as a broad generalization, call it psychobilly/punk rock/rock ’n’ roll.”

“I would describe it as awesome,” she concludes with a big laugh. “Awesomeness on a stick!”

Vice had always loved the upright bass, and a friend working at Doo Wop Shop gave her a good deal on one. “I fell in love with it, and I love the physical challenge of it, and — I love it. I wouldn’t play anything else.”

“It’s fun to jump on,” adds King. “I do a lot of tricks with it,” Vice laughs.

Guitarist Climer joined the band a year ago, helping the spry King be able to put his guitar down more often, and “jump around and climb on things,” adding to the appeal of the live show.

The Vice Tricks album also documents the contributions made by their keyboardist, Evmenios Poulias, better known to fans as Dr. Evil. Poulias has returned to his native Greece, where he is a third-generation dentist in his family’s practice. Having come to the United States four years ago for a residency, Poulias joined the band a year and a half ago, having been recommended by “a friend of a friend of a friend” on Facebook.

“It was love at first sight. We practiced and it was like, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s it!” says Vice. “We miss him terribly.” Poulias is scheduled to return to Louisville for Saturday’s record release show.

“We were sad to see him go,” agrees King. “The last show we did, his friends kept bringing up shots of Drambuie. He ended up on the ground — playing with one hand, drinking with the other.”

They’re not going to replace him. “There’s no way,” says Vice. “We’re gonna rock it out as the band we are without him.” His girlfriend has roots in Louisville, so he’ll be back often.

It’s a band made up of “do-it-yourself people,” Vice says, though they’ve used Kickstarter to try to keep going. True to their worldview, they asked for $666.

We’ve heard it all again that rock ’n’ roll is dead/
Not one time, not two times, but it’s your time/
Never believe it, never receive it/
cut you like a knife ’cause rock ’n’ roll ain’t dead.

Vice Tricks with The Queers, The Manges and Stoner Moms
Saturday, Dec. 29
Diamond Pub
630 Barret Ave.
diamondpubandbilliards.com
$10 (adv.), $12 (doors); 9 p.m.

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

Black and Blue and White

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White Reaper is a fuzz-rock explosion made up of two: guitarist and vocalist Anthony Esposito and drummer and “cassette tape technology” specialist Nick Wilkerson. Their debut album, White Aura, was released on Halloween. “We’re really influenced by fuzzy 1960s and 1970s kind of stuff, like Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath, but we’re also really influenced by more poppy stuff like the Beach Boys,” Esposito says.

When asked how they get some of the sounds that distinguish them, Wilkerson explains, “We use a delay pedal to make cool noises, and we recorded drums on a 4-track in our dear friend Hank Paradis’ barn.”

The North Oldham natives are finishing up their studies at MTSU and are returning to Louisville full time. Their next chapter starts with a show at the Rudyard Kipling tonight (Dec. 19), headlined by another of Wilkerson’s bands, The New Mexico, which has also included his twin brother Sam and Esposito.

“We grew up in Louisville, and we met each other when we went to school in Oldham County,” Wilkerson says. They bonded over hardcore shows and started playing together four years ago. They both decided to go to MTSU, 30 minutes from Nashville, to study audio production.

“We really liked Nashville, we went to some awesome shows, but we always had to bum rides from kids who had cars, so we also missed a lot of awesome shows,” Wilkerson laments. “We’re really excited about moving back because it was a lot harder for us to properly jam in a dorm room.”

Discouraged by the commuter nature of their school, the duo is excited to return home.

“Louisville is a place where we can practice whenever we want, record whenever we want, and we know a little bit more about how the Louisville scene works,” Wilkerson says. “Our plan is to write a ton and tour as much as possible. Basically, we want to do everything that we were too young to do in our previous bands. Now that we are older, we can work harder and we have bigger plans.”

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

We are young

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Jordan Trabue’s folk-rock quartet, Beady, was approached by sonaBLAST Records boss Gill Holland about a year and a half ago. The band has been playing together for three years, and half of the band (Jesse Weber-Owens, 17, who plays cello, banjo and percussion, and violinist Sarah Trabue, 16) is still in high school.

Jordan Trabue, 21, plays guitar, mandolin and banjo, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State this year. Dylan Weber-Owens, also 21 and also a guitarist and banjo player, is at U of L. The pair of siblings seems to have simple goals: “We play a bunch of different instruments, sing some harmonies, and generally try to have a good time,” says Jordan. But there might be more ambition under that laid-back approach.

“sonaBLAST has been great to work with,” he says. “They financed our first professionally recorded album, as well as our first music video.”

The album, the aptly named Youngest Days, was released earlier this week. The first video was for their song “When I’m Twenty.” Though half of the band has already passed that point, “We kept the song, though, because it’s fun and catchy.”

With a nod to the Beatles, Trabue is asked where he might be when he’s 64. He replies, “I hope that by the time I’m 64, we’ve made more songs so I’m not still singing about being 20. It might weird some people out.”

Another song, “You Belong in Louisville,” sounds like another contender for an anthem. Trabue acknowledges that it’s been suggested that he pitch the song to the tourist board, but he downplays the possibility.

“I’m not sure if it would work to attract tourists. I think it’s certainly a good song, if I’m allowed to say that about my own songs, but it’s sort of this sweet, low, mumble of a love song rather than something bright and catchy that tourist boards might go for.”

Beady performs live on WFPK’s “Live Lunch” on Friday and at the Douglass Loop Heine Brothers on Saturday at 3 p.m.

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

Sid Griffin finds himself

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Louisville native brings bluegrass overseas

“I have made about 16 albums, so I kinda have the hang of that,” says Sid Griffin, mandolinist and singer with the London-based band The Coal Porters.

It sounds like a boast, but it’s a well-earned statement of fact. While Griffin’s success in the marketplace hasn’t always equaled the level of respect he’s earned from other musicians and serious music junkies, he’s had a long, strange trip taking him from the seedy Hollywood clubs of the 1980s to today’s London pubs. And it all started in Louisville, back in 1955.

“To me, it was a dying city growing up,” Griffin says now. “Safe, kinda fun, full of my friends, but not a very adventurous or dynamic town to me at all.”

That may have just been a child’s perspective, or a fair assessment of that somewhat dull point in history, but as he grew, Griffin found some kindred spirits.

“Years later, when I got into NRBQ and remembered seeing the Oxfords about 1970, then I realized I had it all wrong — there was local talent.” Griffin also remembers attending a Trinity dance around 1967 and seeing a band called the Alphabetical Order, whose cover of the Stones’ “Under My Thumb” received airplay on WKLO.

He also saw Motley Kru — not the hair-metal legends — at another dance. “Musically, all the local bands in bars that I saw either played covers or were not very imaginative.”

Today, Griffin says, “parts of Louisville seem so vibrant.” He attributes this to the influence of hippies, punk rockers and gays. “You got a legitimate scene happening from the very people society doesn’t really like or respect.”

Even with a family and solid career, Griffin remains an outsider. He moved to England 15 years or so ago for love. The author of two books on Bob Dylan, Griffin has also seen his identity shift throughout his life in music. With his first popular band, The Long Ryders, Griffin was a pivotal figure in the early ’80s development of what is now often called “alt-country.”

Perhaps some of his eighth-generation Kentuckian roots were coming through — he has written a book on bluegrass, as well — but on the surface, at least, Griffin was merely continuing the legacy of Gram Parsons, another subject of a Griffin book.

His current band has been around for most of those 15 years. Time has seen The Coal Porters evolve from a rock band to what Griffin calls “the world’s first alt-bluegrass band.”

“There is a small scene for American roots music in England, but not nearly as big as Americans think. Not nearly,” he says. “All these folks come over to tour here or live here three months and think they can break it like Hendrix did by coming over in September ’66 … but that so rarely works.”

Griffin has seen other Yanks draw a crowd in London and think they’re on the way up. “Then they do a tour, and in Glasgow they draw 35, in Birmingham they draw 20, and in Newcastle upon Tyne they draw 15. I mean, it is tough out there.” Even Dolly Parton has trouble playing in England outside London, he notes.

“I think The Coal Porters stand out here as we have never thrown in the towel, and hence have a good reputation building up under us,” Griffin says. They were featured recently on NPR’s “Morning Edition” and on BBC Radio 2. “Certainly we are known for having an American in the band … I reckon we are about the only British ‘Americana’ act with an actual American in the ensemble. Which makes me laugh.”

It’s a relatively good time to be in a British Americana band, as Mumford & Sons have experienced, but Griffin has seen too much to expect a repeat of that story for his band. Find the One, their eighth album, was released in September, featuring production by John Wood and an appearance by guitar god Richard Thompson. It’s another chapter in the book of Griffin’s musical life, and it won’t be the last. About his current bandmates, he says wryly, “Some of the guys were making their first or second album when they made Find the One, the newest smash by The Coal Porters.”

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

Father Figures’ zombie jazz

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There aren’t a lot of jazz musicians who are also good at marketing their music, but Father Figures’ leader Adam Schatz has found a hook. The band explains that “Zombie Jazz” is a name “… we made up to describe the music we made up: instinct driven. Wild when it wants to be, other times deliberate.” It certainly gets more attention than simply stating, “We’re another jazz band,” which they definitely aren’t.

Father Figures are five musicians with training and interest in jazz, rock and other forms of musical expression. Now based in Brooklyn, they came together in 2006 having met in music school at NYU, intending to form a mostly improvised group who sounded so in sync with each other that the audience would assume they were performing already completed material. “And all the while, we move toward the collective goal of listenability, fun and spontaneity.”

When they’re not having fun together, the members have also sat in with a diverse group of newer artists in the indie rock and electronic scenes, such as Matthew Dear, Buke & Gase, Hospitality, Those Darlins and Adam Green. When LEO spoke with Schatz recently, he had just been in the studio with cult favorites Man Man working on their upcoming album.

They come through Louisville on a brief tour heading from New York to New Orleans, hitting bars, art galleries and colleges in lieu of traditional jazz clubs. At Oberlin College, they’ll also be leading a workshop.

“One of the cool things about this tour is that we can do a lot of sides of the equation,” Schatz says. “We were sort of having a crisis in rehearsal, saying, ‘What are we going to be able to teach college kids?’”

They’ve led workshops before, teaching improv to high schoolers, but this will be their oldest group so far. They show students how they use physical cues to communicate with each other while improvising, then let students try before the band joins in with the kids. “It should be great, I don’t have any sincere fears about it,” Schatz continues, “but it’s funny when we’re in the basement, making each other laugh and being ridiculous, and then thinking about how we’re going to be teaching people.”

It’s their chemistry, in the basement and onstage, that keeps them going, says Schatz, despite the financial difficulties involved with such music. Having met in college, Father Figures has given them an excuse to stay friends, and a home base to return to with new tricks learned playing with others.

“I think audiences really connect with that, and I think it’s super-apparent that we want people to have as much fun listening to us as we do playing the music.”

Their latest release is an EP called Bad Bad Birds, and it’s available through their Bandcamp page, as is their self-titled debut album. They know they’re selling themselves to a younger audience, one infrequently attentive to jazz music. For this tour, they’ve also handmade unique beak creatures, akin to sock puppets, which contain copies of the EP in a USB port stored on the beak’s tongue. It’s music with a history, file-shared in a brand new way.

Father Figures with Mindhorn and Camera Lucida
Thursday, Dec. 13
Haymarket Whiskey Bar
331 E. Market St.
haymarketwhiskeybar.com
$5; 9 p.m.

c. 2012 LEO Weekly

Snow job

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What’s the deal with Jewish Christmas records?

Each fall, for too many years, record store clerks have watched a familiar scenario unfold, as predictable as falling leaves and as unattractive as naked, soaped-up Santa in the shower — otherwise intelligent adults groping through hundreds of Christmas CDs, forced to pick one for Mom/Grandma/Secret Santa/party ambiance, when they’d rather not be throwing away their $15.99 on more disposable, hard-to-stomach crap at Christmastime.

For Rod Stewart or Tony Bennett, it’s a sure thing, easy money. For the labels and the stores or download sites, it’s an annuity, a tradition that stays steadily strong even as it gets bigger and more grotesque. It affects not only our best — 1957’s Elvis’ Christmas Album has sold 12 million copies — but also our worst (Kenny G has the second biggest seller, Miracles, at 7 million sold since 1994).

This cultural plague has affected many who seem to think that their “White Christmas” will make you forget versions by Manheim Steamroller or Celine Dion. The plague has also affected those who have no other reason to celebrate the Christian holiday: Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Neil Sedaka, Carole King, Barry Manilow, Bette Midler, Bob Freaking Dylan! And don’t forget that Kenny G.

Why are these singers of Jewish descent, who would be even less likely to be seen in a church on Sunday morning than Abu Nazir, recording odes to the joy of the Gentile holiday — and trying to sell it as an artistic statement?

The reasons might be slightly more complex than what’s obvious. Money drives many motives, and early 1990s Neil Diamond was as artistically pure as Lindsay Lohan borrowing money from Charlie Sheen on the set of “Scream 5.” But this shit works, so his The Christmas Album sold 2 million copies, followed two years later by The Christmas Album, Vol. II.

Even by the most generous assessment, it’s hard to deny how horrifically bad A Neil Diamond Christmas can be. The heavily synthesized production is stuck in the worst of the ’80s, and he barks out lines like He’s gonna find out/who’s naughty or nice like he’s yelling at a cheating wife. Then there’s the reggae version of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Uncool runnings, Neil, uncool.

His third collection, 2009’s A Cherry Cherry Christmas, features 10 songs from his first two mistakes plus five new recordings, including a cover of Adam Sandler’s lonely classic “The Chanukah Song.” “There are so many beautiful Christmas songs around, and so few Chanukah songs,” Diamond laments in the intro, ignoring the fact that he has had 50 years in which to write at least one.

Then there’s Carole King, one of the most successful songwriters in human history. Her unnecessary 2011 entry, A Holiday Carole, includes a “Chanukah Prayer” in the middle of 11 less Yiddishkeit-friendly tunes, and features a duet with her pre-pubescent grandson — practicing for the day when he becomes a man. Glad you spent that $15.99?

There’s no way to not be kinder when discussing Streisand’s approach to Christmas music. Her first, A Christmas Album, came out in 1967 when she and her career were still somewhat young, hungry and jazzy. Her breathless rendition of “Jingle Bells” is firmly in the beatnik coffeehouse style of the day and holds up well — especially when compared to her 2001 follow-up, Christmas Memories. What memories, Yentl? Those Christmases you and James Brolin spent in Aspen? It’s not even that bad, musically, but it sounds like exactly what it is: a pampered old rich lady demanding more attention and money.

And Dylan? Well, he likes to do the unexpected, and what was less expected than a Bob Dylan Christmas album? If you let his slurry delivery distract you from the lyrics, it sounds more like a mid-’70s Tom Waits album than Garth Brooks’ Beyond the Season. He told journalist Bill Flanagan that, having grown up in snowy Minnesota, the songs were “part of my life, just like folk songs.”

So perhaps his album — all these albums — are less crass commercial ventures than just another chapter in the American Experiment, the Great Melting Pot where we all become one. Or maybe a music critic, who hates pretty much everything about a world where “American Idol” and its copycats dictate what popular music is in America, is the wrong person to ask.

c. 2012 LEO Weekly