Lynyrd Skynyrd

CHRISTMAS TIME AGAIN

(CMC)

You don't really think that Lynyrd Skynyrd would do anything as cheesy as recording 11 Christmas songs that sound exactly like "Free Bird," do you? Hell, no -- only about half the tracks on Christmas Time Again sound like "Free Bird." Most of the rest sound like "Sweet Home Alabama" -- a real feat, since one of them is "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer."

For anyone keeping track, only two members of the "Free Bird"-era Skynyrd are still alive and aboard. But the current singer is Ronnie van Zant's brother, and the new guitarist is from the Outlaws, so you can barely tell the difference. Still, this set isn't as much dumb fun as it might have been, since they fall prey to the usual Christmas-album trap of getting all soft and sentimental. "Mama's Song" is truly cringeworthy, and they play "Greensleeves" as if somebody had told them it's a classical piece. Of the rest, "Santa's Messin' with the Kid" and Chuck Berry's "Run Rudolph Run" bring out the good-times boogie of vintage Skynyrd, and that sounds pretty damn refreshing nowadays. Charlie Daniels turns up to prove he's still alive and perfectly capable of making "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town" sound like "The Devil Went Down to Georgia." The closing "Skynyrd Family" is so cheesy that it works as one of those Southern-band camaraderie songs that were briefly the rage in the '70s. Daniels keeps trying to sneak in the fiddle riff from "The South's Gonna Do It Again" while the band quote their own lyrics ("big wheels turnin' again"), namecheck other long-forgotten outfits, and generally act as if Jimmy Carter were still president. In their world he probably still is.

-- Brett Milano