Ever since Sia transitioned from “Six Feet Under” coffeeshop songwriter to Top 40 fixture, her career has contained the tension between the writer she’s trained as and the pop star she’s become. Specifically, she has a habit of giving smart, bluntly candid interviews in songwriter mode that are, in pop mode, the exact wrong thing to say. A Billboard interview where she mentioned the “victim to victory” songwriting template of tracks like “Titanium” was thrown back at her, in the headline of a New York Times pan of This Is Acting and countless other reviews. So what was it like writing her first Christmas album? “[There’s a] shortage of good Christmas music… It's not like you have to have an original idea to begin with,” Sia told Zane Lowe. “It's like, Christmas, mistletoe, ho-ho-ho, Santa Claus, Christmas list, elves.” This is technically accurate, in the way that a professional elf might accurately describe Christmas gift-giving as “like, hammer, nails, molds, wrapping paper.” But it also kind of grinches up the business.
Of course, there’s no shortage of existing Christmas songs—virtually every musician records them as a quick stocking-stuffer for music blogs and streaming sites—but most of them are strictly for diehard fans. As far as canonical Christmas songs, the past few decades have produced basically only two. There’s the “All I Want for Christmas Is You” school: festive (or “Extra Festive” or “SuperFestive!”, as Mariah Carey dubbed the re-recordings of her hit) and infectious, in both senses of the word. Then there’s the “Last Christmas” school, where Christmas is an incidental setting for smaller human dramas. There’s plenty of room for variation here, from the downright morose original versions of “White Christmas” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” to the acid-dipped tinsel of Dragonette’s “Merry Xmas (Says Your Text Message),” to the sumptuous femme-fatale drama of Saint Etienne’s “No Cure for the Common Christmas,” to the infinite takes on Wham!’s original.
The latter’s also closest to Sia’s non-holiday music, where big pop songs like “Chandelier” are infused with an underlying darkness. It’s a strange choice, then, that Everyday Is Christmas is mostly played straight. Like Kelly Clarkson’s Wrapped in Red, the album was produced by Greg Kurstin, and his trademark shiny production becomes DEFCON 1 festive. “Candy Cane Lane” is colorful and lightweight. “Santa’s Coming for You” has an ironic title, but the only threat is being smothered by Christmas cheer. There are some lovely ballads, such as the lilting, “Unchained Melody”-esque “Snowman” and its sister light-jazz track “Snowflake” (only kind of ruined by the news of 2017 discoursing the word into oblivion), which linger on the season’s impermanence. But they’re the same metaphor, so the effect is muted by sequencing them right next to each other—or anywhere close to “Puppies Are Forever,” the sonic equivalent of having the Christmas stuffing squeezed out of you by a rictus-grinned Elmyra Duff.
There’s plenty Sia could do with an album entirely of Christmas originals, but too many are underwritten; there’s more consistency in the art direction than the songwriting. “Underneath the Mistletoe” flirts with being candid about an obsessive holiday crush—“it’s Christmas time, so run for your life”—but abandons the idea almost immediately. Half of “Ho Ho Ho” wants to be a Christmas misfits’ anthem; the other half wants to be a Christmas version of “Chandelier,” with lots of booze, nothing to lose. The production, vaguely festive and vaguely pop-skanky, doesn’t commit to either. Sia’s got a self-own for this, too: “It was easy and fun. We did it in two weeks.” Of course, plenty of great albums were secretly written in two weeks, just like plenty of fine presents were secretly purchased on the eve of December 24. But it’s still like opening a gift where someone’s forgotten to remove the tags.
