Featured were four original songs by Cash, along with eight covers including takes of "I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day," "Silent Night," "Blue Christmas," and others. This is a solidly enjoyable entry from Cash, and a must-have for die-hard aficionados of the country icon.

Showbiz has been in Gwen Stefani's blood since the start of her career, which is the reason why she, unlike many '90s alt-rock veterans, can seem at home within the confines of the televised musical competition The Voice. Her very presence on The Voice, one of the last genuinely popular franchises on network television in the 2010s, guaranteed the existence of an album like You Make It Feel Like Christmas, one that's pitched directly in the mainstream. You Make It Feel Like Christmas plays upon her romance with co-host Blake Shelton, making her bouncy duet with the country singer the album's title track and first single. "You Make It Feel Like Christmas" bops along to a Motown beat, just one of many intentional nostalgic nods at the past – "Never Kissed Anyone with Blue Eyes" grooves to a simmering '60s soul groove, her version of "Santa Baby" has a mid-century swing, Wham!'s "Last Christmas" is given drippy strings that turn it into a girl group number – but the record is surprisingly heavy on new material for a holiday album. Occasionally, this means Stefani veers into territory that doesn't feel strictly seasonal: "When I Was a Little Girl" plays like a diary entry, not a memory of Christmases past, "My Gift Is You" is a love song bearing the faintest hint of mistletoe, and "Never Kissed Anyone with Blue Eyes" has only a tangential relationship with Christmas. They don't seem out of place, since they're given the same bells and whistles as "Let It Snow" and "White Christmas," but they also diminish the album, making it seem smaller than the season. Still, the moments that work have a coquettish charm that is appealing, which is reason enough to warrant a listen.
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New for 2019 from 3 time Grammy Award winning and multi-platinum selling acapella group Pentatonix, comes The Best Of Pentatonix Christmas. The best-of album will feature four new songs, in addition to the quintet's biggest and best-selling songs and collaborations from their past 4 holiday albums.

After ragtime music enjoyed a revival of popularity in the 1960s, American composer William Bolcom contributed some new pieces to the genre. It's putting things too strongly to say, as the graphics here do, that these works "would organically interweave American popular music cultures into the fabric of concert music for decades to come"; in fact, these delightful pieces are underrepresented in concert and on recordings, and this recording by pianist Spencer Myer is welcome. Myer rightly makes the pieces into concert works, not showboat nostalgia, but he avoids the rhythmically denatured sound of Joshua Rifkin's Scott Joplin recordings.