Vonda Shepard

A Very Ally Christmas

Only for Ally fanatics...

Review Score:

(4/10)
Hey, I LIKE the show enough, but it seems to be trying to wear out its welcome. Perhaps it should have just been marketed as a Vonda Shepard album since she is winning her own fan base.
Shepard's covers are pretty much what you hear on the show... accurate, but almost vacant of any real soul or emotion. It reminds me of when Paul Young released a plain vanilla cover of the Motown classic "Oh, Girl" -- Shepard's versions of "Please Come Home for Christmas" and "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" don't really carry any weight of what the songs are trying to say. They're just "Vonda-Shepard-versions-of-songs-done-better-previously-by-someone-else". (Shepard is quite capable of bringing pathos into original songs: Check out the duet "Baby, Don't You Break My Heart Slow" with Emily Saliers of Indigo Girls on one of the other Ally sountracks).
Vocally, "Santa Baby" is cute and kind of sexy, as long as you don't picture Flockhart singing it. It adds a dimension of someone desperately TRYING to be cute and sexy despite evidence to the contrary.
I agree that a pleasant surprise is Downey's version of "River" which brings an emotional edge that I didn't even get from Joni Mitchell's original.
Overall, it targets Ally fans, not music fans.

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