Capitalizing on the recent spate of female singer-songwriters to make a strong mark in the popular consciousness, modest Los Angeles venue The Hotel Café has assembled an impressive assortment of wintry, chilly tunes well-suited for the holiday season, and beyond, many from singers who've honed their skills at the club.

Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson open the album with the sweet duet "Winter Song," a delicate acoustic number that pairs a keening violin with the ladies' harmonized vocals asking "Is love alive?" The answer is a resounding, "Yes."

Brandi Carlile's "The Heartache Can Wait" is a real winner, proving that a few sleighbells here and there can add the right amount of melancholy and seasonal pathos. It's another of the compilation's original songs.

It's not all hushed voices and acoustic instruments on Winter Songs; KT Tunstall takes a lively if predictable turn with "Sleigh Ride." Her slight English accent offers at least an interesting twist to the classic tune, if not a groundbreaking interpretation. Nicole Atkins' take on Elvis' "Blue Christmas," though, keeps the woozy sorrow while losing the original's peppiness, and that's too obvious a path to explore with the song. Meiko's sex-kittenish, noir-tinged "Maybe Next Year (X-mas Song)" is a sultry, slinky original song. Though it's not likely to join the canon of Christmas tunes, it's still a worthy song regardless of its holiday setting. Like many of the Winter Songs tracks, it's quality, it's impressive, but it's a holiday song and with so many of those out there these days, none of these tracks is required listening. Enjoyable, but not essential.

—Chris Hassiotis
01.04.08

Although this Christmas compilation includes tracks by Katy Perry and Colbie Caillat, two hyper-marketable artists for the 2008 holiday season, the true appeal of Winter Songs is the spotlight it gives to emerging musicians. Nicole Atkins channels Roy Orbison's honeyed, vibrato-laden croon during "Blue Christmas," Ingrid Michaelson duets with Sarah Bareilles during the sparse "Winter Song," and Lenka reprises the bubbly sounds of her debut album (almost to saccharine effect) with an original song named "All My Bells Are Ringing." The biggest highlights arrive later in the set list, when Meiko sexily rasps her way through "Maybe Next Year (X-Mas Song)," perhaps the best original composition here, and Priscilla Ahn sings a gorgeous a cappella arrangement of "Silent Night." The latter song is the disc's crown jewel, a lush mixture of sustained notes and pitch-perfect intervals that emphasize Winter Songs' true focus: the talents of the Hotel Café's alumni, not the cheap appeal of someone like Katy Perry, whose wannabe jazz interpretation of "White Christmas" is as vanilla as the songtitle suggests. ~ Andrew Leahey, All Music Guide