Dec 12, 2008  |  By: JOEY DiGUGLIELMO  | COMMENTS     

Three of pop music’s biggest female singers have released their first-ever Christmas albums this season, with varied, but mostly solid, results.

Lesbian Melissa Etheridge’s “A New Thought For Christmas” comes almost exactly a year after “The Awakening,” her last release. Sheryl Crow’s “Home For Christmas,” available only at Hallmark Gold Crown stores, is her second album this year — the solid “Detours” dropped in February. Aretha Franklin only records intermittently these days. “This Christmas” is her first album of all-new material since 2003’s “So Damn Happy.”

That these albums exist at all is pleasantly surprising, albeit for wildly varying reasons. Etheridge, despite her hit-and-miss catalog, is one of only a few great modern women rockers — she exhibits none of the schmaltz typically associated with Christmas music so that she recorded such an album, as she acknowledges in the liner notes, is unexpected.

Crow, while not as primal a rocker as Etheridge, also doesn’t fit the typical Christmas album bill.

Franklin, though, is the opposite. With her roots in the church, her live gospel albums and her mastery of nearly every form of popular music, a Christmas album from the Queen of Soul has been a glaring omission from her canon for decades, a point she’s acknowledged.

Each of these records has its moments, but Franklin’s — the most anticipated by miles — is also the most erratic.

It opens with a down-tempo, almost lazy river interpretation of “Angels We Have Heard on High.” The melismatic “glorias” of its famous chorus give Franklin plenty of space to bend the melody to her own interpretation (she’s a master of this), but she takes breaths in all the wrong places (mid-gloria, even), making for an oddly frustrating track.

That approach works much better on regal renditions of “Silent Night,” which becomes more of a power ballad than a lullaby here, “Ave Maria” and the stately new song, “One Night With the King,” which Franklin previewed along with two other tracks from this album during an October D.C. concert.

Ultimately, though, there’s too much slowish mush here. Franklin’s mere presence elevates the bland proceedings on several tracks but a few more energetic arrangements were sorely needed. Even “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” which soars along in an almost march-like tempo when church congregations sing it, is given an oddly slow arrangement here. It gives Franklin plenty of time and space to massage the melody into her own creation, but I’d hoped there’d be a cut or two that would have recreated the high energy gospelized smack-down Franklin brought to “Joy to the World,” a one off she cut in ’94 that eventually showed up on a Target multiple artist compilation and popped up again two years ago on a slapped-together Franklin budget holiday set.

Franklin is in fine voice throughout. She sounds quite different than she did during her late ’60s heyday — there’s not as much clarity to her timbre, yet her upper register is more expansive and a raspy creaminess has developed in recent years, giving her more luster and color.

Oddly, the best cut isn’t a Christmas song. Slinky, bass-heavy gospel number “The Lord Will Make a Way” is one of the best religious songs Franklin ever recorded. It’s so strong, in fact, it makes me hope there’s another gospel album in her future.

Unfortunately, “This Christmas” wouldn’t be a modern-day Franklin album without a train wreck or two. The same lack of judgment that’s convinced the overweight singer she looks good in sleeveless gowns with plunging necklines pops up here in a pair of skin-crawlingly bad sketches, the bane of many an R&B album.

The title cut (a contemporary standard) opens with a dreadfully contrived cell phone “conversation” in which Franklin has to go because the holiday feast she’s creating is burning. Even worse is her spoken-word rendition of “Twas the Night Before Christmas” in which she imagines a man showing up in a Bentley instead of Santa. It could have been fun in a campy, drag queen kind of way, except for one small problem — it’s not the least bit funny despite Franklin’s maniacal cackle at the end, which closes the record on a head-scratching note.

Etheridge, who’s not religious, takes a more New Age-y approach to the season on her disc. She suggests (and even borrows melodies) from a few religious holiday standards on “Glorious” and “O Night Divine” but the Judeo-Christian themes have been replaced with more general observations about love, peace, angels and wintertime. It will either feel refreshing or banal based on your ...