Notable CDs

There’s little up-to-date information on this folk duo on the internet, so save yourself search time and go straight to bandcamp.com, where you can easily sample and buy these dozen acoustic renditions of mostly well-known sacred favorites. What internet information there is suggests that Caine and Bush are based in Charlottesville, Va., and parishioners of a nearby Episcopal church. But all that matters where their music is concerned is that they sing as well as they play and play as sensitively as they arrange.

Four Hands & A Heart Christmas

Carlton’s exquisite smooth-jazz guitar chops prove even more suitable to the melodies of these six carols and three yuletide pop standards than they did to the 11 Gamble-and-Huff melodies of 2010’s Larry Carlton Plays the Sound of Philadelphia. Revisiting the overdubbed acoustic-electric guitar approach of 2012’s Four Hands & A Heart Volume One, Carlton achieves effects that are delicate but not wimpy and individual but not idiosyncratic. Vocal-free Christmas-party background music at its finest—and pretty good as foreground music too.

Harmony is Real: Songs for a Happy Holiday

Imagine an Andrews Sisters-Roches hybrid plus a fourth-part harmony and the talent to assemble a dozen-song holiday album with only two standards and one carol, and you’ll have a fair idea of this indie-female folkish quartet’s charms. As befits their droll unsentimentality, the mood stays light. But “unsentimental” plus “light” in their case equals “buoyant” more often than not and “cute” only a little. And, anyway, their cutest songs (“Kadoka, South Dakota” and the Beach Boys–worthy “Christmas in California”) are also their catchiest.

Christmas ... Not the Way it Seems

Watson’s vocal and musical styles are offshoots of Celtic folk rather than channelers of its essence. In other words, while Loreena McKennitt fans will like her, McKennitt nonfans will probably like her more. There’s nothing spectacular about Watson’s performances of these carols or of the 2012-copyrighted title cut, but there’s plenty that’s lovely and in keeping with the holiness of the holiday, including but not limited to the sounds that Phil Keaggy contributes to the first of two versions of “Do You Hear What I Hear.”

Spotlight

With Blood Oranges in the Snow (Great Speckled Dog), the veteran husband-wife duo Over the Rhine achieves something rare: Christmas-themed songs that also work as stand-alone singer-songwriter introspection. As Christians, Linford Detweiler and Karin Bergquist aren’t content merely to take their emotional pulses. Both “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” show up as codas.

But Detweiler and Bergquist don’t deny their emotions either. As adults who’ve been around various blocks, they realize that, this side of eternity, there’s no disentangling what they know of Christmas from what they’ve also learned of human frailty. Or, as they sing in “Bethlehem,” “Sometimes there’s no difference / between a birthmark and a scar.” Meanwhile, they visit a parent in a cemetery, hope that they can still believe that the Christ child holds a gift for them, and make Merle Haggard’s “If We Make It Through December” their own. —A.O.