This Glorious Christmas
Artist: the Annie Moses Band
Label: manAlive Records / Reunion Records
Time: 12 tracks / 47:30

The Annie Moses Band is no stranger to Christmas music, having already given us three memorable collections of holiday standards and Wolaver family originals performed in their unique ‘chamber pop’ style.  This year, the band assembles their best seasonal treats and gives us something old, something new, something ‘borrowed,’ and even one red, white and blue bonus track, on their Reunion Records release, This Glorious Christmas. 

 For those who are unfamiliar with the band (and there are too many that fall into that category), _This Glorious Christmas_ will serve as an introduction to the amazing Wolaver family: Annie (lead vocals, violin), Alex (viola, Background vocals), Benjamin (cello, comedy), Gretchen (violin, mandolin) and Camille (harp, keyboards). The precocious siblings handle their father’s dazzling arrangements (Bill Wolaver writes, arranges and plays piano) under the watchful eye of Robin (mom) Wolaver, who is also a vocalist and lyricist with the group. If Christmas is about family, then the Annie Moses Band is about Christmas – the result is a Christmas album that’s as warm as a stone hearth and as exciting as a sleigh ride. Thanks to the recent partnership with Reunion records, the Annie Moses Band will hopefully get the exposure they deserve. 

Like all Annie Moses Band albums, this is music that will appeal most of all to those who value family and their Christian heritage, and have a wide enough musical framework to be able to incorporate classical, jazz, and pop styles into their musical aesthetic. There are instrumental tracks here as well as tracks with vocals. The jazz swings hard enough and the strings thrill enough to take the edge off of the adult contemporary mode that the group flirts with. This is a family that values excellence – and it shows. Don’t look for rough edges here. This is intricately arranged, superbly performed music featuring soaring, swirling strings, airy, well-controlled voices, intensely jazzy moments, and timeless Christmas themes. The well-known classics are uniquely rendered and the Wolaver’s original songs are meaningful songs, and passionately presented.

At this time of revisiting friends and family the Annie Moses Band revisits the best of their previous Christmas albums. _This Glorious Christmas_ is more than simply a ‘best of’ collection – the ‘old’ tracks have been remastered and sound warm and inviting, the new tracks are delightful and inventive, the tracks they’ve ‘borrowed’ from themselves and re-worked sound fresh and inspired and the bonus track, “Red, White and Blue,” resurrected from the _Message in a Baby_ album, is infused with new levels of meaning.

Even if you own the group’s previous Christmas projects, This Glorious Christmas deserves to be on your Christmas giving or receiving list. It’s a condensed collection of well-chosen highlights and  new surprises. The newly-recorded “Sussex Carol Vocal Intro” transports you to a classic Christmas straight out of Dickens. Another new recording to the Wolaver canon, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” is a soaring, jazzy, yet reverent re-imagining of the well-known anthem, a fitting companion-piece to the Bethlehem: House of Bread CD’s “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” which, like “Little Baby,” is re-worked and newly recorded for this new release. The album’s bonus track, “Red, White and Blue,” a forties nightclub-style song dealing with the often-used theme of a soldier away from home for the holidays, could very well garner nation-wide attention if promoted properly – the timing is right and the song is memorable and emotionally moving thanks to great words, a solid melody and a fine vocal performance by Annie.

This Glorious Christmas, by the Annie Moses Band, is a glorious collection of songs that will help to make your Christmas, well …glorious.

Bert Saraco 
http://www.myspace.com/expressimage  
http://expressimagephoto.tripod.com