New Christmas albums

Caroling at Ephesus

Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles

While Advent at Ephesus, the Christmas recording that these a cappella singing nuns released in 2012, contained only one well-known English-language carol, this album contains eight (out of 24 total selections) and thus seems likely to become the more popular of the two. Not that the obscurities are hard to enjoy. Whether in English, Latin, or German, the hushed reverence with which they’re sung will elevate them for anyone capable of appreciating the power of quiet, small voices.

Unto Us

JJ Heller

If you didn’t know that Heller was a Christian, her substitution of “the Lord” for “the Fates” in “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” would have you suspecting as much. More evidence: her including Irving Berlin’s “Count Your Blessings” (which in this context takes on enhanced spiritual significance) and her concluding this folk-pop gem with four consecutive carols. Heller has a lovely, childlike voice and a sharp mind. The latter she evinces on the three songs she wrote with her husband, the former on all 13.

White Christmas Blue

Loretta Lynn

If Lynn sounds younger than her 84 years on these liltingly swinging country carols and pop songs, one reason may be that she recorded some of them in her 70s. The mystery is why her voice doesn’t seemed to have aged since she released her first Christmas album 50 years ago. If anything, her singing has become sweeter and more flexible. And more Southern. How else to categorize her going from “chimney” in “To Heck with Ole Santa Claus” circa 1966 to “chimley” in the 2016 model?

Simply Christmas

Leslie Odom Jr.

The aesthetic strategy of this Tony Award–winning performer may look typical to a fault on paper. And some of the time it sounds that way too. Odom’s floating vocals tend to go so compliantly with the music’s mellow flow that whole songs come and go without making an impression. One, however—Odom’s interpretation of “My Favorite Things”—makes quite an impression indeed. Not since Freddy Cole rescued “Just the Way You Are” have a lithe voice and a fresh jazz arrangement so effectively combined to ennoble sentimentality.

Encore

For the most part, Kurt Elling’s jazzy, part-sacred, part-secular The Beautiful Day (OKeh/Sony Masterworks) and Kacey Musgraves’ countrified all-secular A Very Kacey Christmas (Mercury Nashville) contribute to the jolliness of the season. Elling has never sung better or applied his croon to more inventive arrangements (he even warms up a Dan Fogelberg chestnut to nice effect), and Musgraves has never sounded more girlishly lighthearted. Each album, however, contains a rotten apple that threatens to spoil the whole barrel.

Musgraves’ is her duet with Willie Nelson, “A Willie Nice Christmas.” The worst part isn’t the song’s enjoining listeners to get higher than a treetop angel but Musgraves’ indiscriminately wishing them a happy Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa “’cause it’s all the same.” Elling manifests a similarly off-putting cluelessness by rewriting “Some Children See Him.” “Some children see Him as a girl,” he sings approvingly. And in so doing he simultaneously bungles history, theology, and mental health. —A.O.