The Quality Holiday Revue, Nick Lowe and Los Straitjackets (Yep Roc)

When Nick Lowe decided to tour behind his first Christmas album Quality Street last year, he pulled together label mates Los Straitjackets and Faces/Small Faces legend Ian McLagen to make more of a revue out of it. Unfortunately, McLagen died the day before rehearsals for the tour, so the show was Nick and Los Straitjackets. I had the privilege of attending the second show of the tour and it was a lovely time. Now, for 2015, we have an album compiled from those 2014 shows, and the two acts have combined for another pass at America across the South and West this December. This recording (offered on vinyl for Record Store Day but also in the usual formats) is a fine representation of the tour, and Los Straitjackets also put a little more voltage behind Nick, who has been much more mellow in recent years. Only eight of the 13 tunes are Christmas tunes, seven of which are selections from Quality Street and the eighth is Los Straitjackets by themselves on "Linus and Lucy," which we showed you a couple of weeks ago. The performances are aces, and on "North Pole Express," "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day" and "Children Go Where I Send Thee," I'd say Nick's guests goose these songs up nicely, improving on the studio versions. "A Dollar Short of Happy" and "I Was Born in Bethlehem" are just Nick and a guitar. The remaining songs are from Nick's catalog and benefit similarly from the Straitjackets' backing. A little more from the Straitjackets' Christmas repertoire and less of Nick's non-holiday tunes might have made for a more holiday-appropriate set list, but that's about the only improvement they could have made to this album.