A Lunch at Allen’s Christmas
Zuzu’s Petals

This record is actually pretty good if the kids are off listening to their crazy Dan Mangan albums and you feel like a little sweater-shaped Christmas music to go with the after-dinner port and cheeses. What you get here is a couple of ’70s-vintage Canuck quasi-legends (Murray McLauchlan and Ian Thomas) hooking up with slightly more anonymous Juno-perennials (Cindy Church and Marc Jordan) to make the kind of tasteful music that white, middle-class Canada still yearns for. That’s assuming that white, middle-class Canada still exists (does it?). Or yearns. In any event, the song title “Six Teams in the NHL” tells you all you need to know. What you don’t know is that “Six Teams in the NHL”—which warmly recalls a time when there was “no airbag, unless you married one” and “al-Qaeda was a guy from Buffalo”—is cowritten by Ian’s brother, SCTV vet Dave Thomas. So it’s got that going for it, which is nice.