Meghan Trainor falls into a unique category of artists - artists people love to hate. Much like Nickelback and Imagine Dragons, Trainor has received plenty of criticism and outright hatred for her early success on the pop charts. Her first hit, “All About That Bass”, received plenty of flack for proposing to be a song about body positivity while pitting Meghan against “skinny bitches” and making that body acceptance contingent upon approval from men. And I won’t even get into the outdated gender roles of “Dear Future Husband”.
Suffice to say, I went into this album expecting to hate it. In fact, I was excited to hate it. I wanted to tear into this album and find all of the funny poorly written lines in Meghan Trainor’s original Christmas songs. Unfortunately, I only half-found what I was expecting.
This album was bad. But it wasn’t bad in the sense that it had gaffes that could be enjoyed ironically. It was a boring, plastic kind of bad - the worst bad of all.
It kicks off with “My Kind of Present”, which opens with an acapella backing, as Meghan Trainor sings that “you’re my kind of present”. The song sounds extremely commercial - not in the sense that it belongs on the radio but in the sense that it belongs in a Christmas commercial for a department store. As I listened to the song, I felt less like I was in a winter wonderland and more like I was in an ad for a Macy’s sweater line.
This atmosphere carries for the entirety of the album, through covers like “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” to originals like “Naughty List”, I cannot picture any of these songs being listened to by a flesh-and-bone human being. The production has no bite to it, but it is garish in the sense that it attempts to incorporate nearly every pop production trend into a squeaky-clean mix. For example, there’s the record scratch at the beginning of “Sleigh Ride” that simply does not belong there. This leads to a clash that feels like the result of careful calculation rather than of creativity.
There’s a few better points on this 55-minute album. There’s “Holidays”, which features Earth, Wind & Fire for some reason. This is one of the cheesier songs on the album, but I think that risk is the only thing that makes it kind of work for me. The trumpets are nice, and this is one of the few places where I think Trainor’s harmonies are effective. I think this song is carried by Earth, Wind & Fire, so I’m glad they’re here.
The other better points on the album come when Meghan Trainor drops the trap hi hats for something that feels authentic to her persona. The final two songs on the album, “I’ll Be Home” and “Silent Night” accomplish this. “I’ll Be Home” is a sweet, albeit somewhat cliche, song about returning home for the holidays. I think Trainor sells it with more restrained production and a surprisingly emotional performance. The final song, “Silent Night”, features Trainor’s father accompanying her on the piano. She pulls back the production and even her harmonization, and the result is a sweet song that shows off her skill as a vocalist.
In other songs, this skill is diluted by Meghan Trainor’s performance choices. She slurs her words a bit in most of the songs, and I don’t understand why she does this. I think it’s intentional and meant to be charismatic, but once I noticed it I found it to be irritating. I’m also not a fan of the extent to which Trainor uses acapella-style harmonization throughout the album, although that might just be personal taste.
Only a few of the songs on this album are outright bad outside of the aforementioned production and vocals. One is “Christmas Party”, an original song, which is basically “House Party” by Sam Hunt but about Christmas (swapping “let’s have a house party, we don’t need nobody” for “let’s have a Christmas party, invite everybody”. I think Sam Hunt has grounds to sue). From the awkward namedrop of Amazon gift cards to the annoying bridge, this was a major low point. Another flop comes in “White Christmas” featuring Seth McFarlane. Unsurprisingly, he sounds extremely out of place here. Though Trainor and McFarlane harmonize with each other, the two have no chemistry. The song is over-embellished and goes on for way too long.
At the end of the day, A Very Trainor Christmas is inoffensive, unremarkable, and exactly what you’d expect from a Meghan Trainor Christmas album. I don’t see a reason to listen to it when far more talented singers have traditional Christmas albums if that’s what you’re looking for, and Sia’s Everyday is Christmas exists for those looking for an over-the-top pop take on Christmas music.
I wish this album was bad in a more outrageous way, so it at least would be fun to listen to. But in the year we’re having, maybe we didn’t need something so shocking. Maybe, to finish off this terrible year, it's best if we end on something that is just a mundane type of bad. A type of bad that doesn’t warrant any outrage. On this front, Meghan Trainor delivers.
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