Heart: Heart & Friends – Home For The Holidays CD (Frontiers)
If you’re looking for Christmas cheer, or you are a completest fan of Heart, then this will be right up your street. Recorded last December in home town Seattle the Wilson sister’s collated a few friends (Sammy Hager, Shawn Colvin, Richard Marx and Pat Monahan) and bought together a festive concert of classic ‘holiday’ tunes, also a few favourites were thrown into the enigmatic performance. Musically it’s a sound piece of work, tight musicianship and all involved seem to be having fun judging by the between song banter, but the whole atmospheric of ‘Home For The Holidays’ leaves me reaching out for my glass of mulled wine, as I put one more log into the wood burner – brilliant if you’re sitting in the warm and watching the winter nights draw in. High lights of the set include a superb version of ‘Barracuda’ which seems so heavy and groovin’ due to the tempo of the rest of the set, and a decent version of ‘Stairway To Heaven’. Now I bet the show itself was spectacular if you were there in person, but is this release really necessary? A live DVD of the occasion is available also if you really want to amp up the atmospherics. Music fans know exactly where Heart has strengths, and seeing a strong resurgence of popularity since 2010’s ‘Red Velvet Car’; maybe this will help fuel the fires for a cracking new studio ‘rock’ album. Mark Freebase